The Rector's Monday Message: May 14, 2012

“God is Not Finished with Me Yet”

This week, two prominent Americans announced that they had undergone significant changes in their thinking and behavior.  On Wednesday, President Obama told ABC News that his thinking on same sex marriage has evolved to the point that he now supports it. "At a certain point I've just concluded that for me, personally, it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married." On Thursday, in response to a Washington Post story on some cruel behavior he had engaged in as a high school student, Governor Romney said, “I’m a very different person than I was in high school.”

I empathize with both President Obama and Governor Romney.  For the past twenty years or so, I have been a strong advocate of same sex marriage.  (I’ve explained my thinking and experience on this issue in the four-week class based on the book I co-edited, Christian Holiness and Human Sexuality.) Before I had extensive experience working with gay and lesbian folks at All Saints Pasadena, though, I’d describe myself as having been “conventionally homophobic”.  I did not initially support full inclusion for LGBT people in the church.  That’s mostly because I knew very few openly gay people then. But years of working with, ministering to, and being ministered to by gay and lesbian clergy and laity changed my mind.  That process is only natural.  We fear what we don’t know and understand what we do.

When the President says his views on same sex marriage “evolved”, I accept his reasoning because his experience is my experience.  I hope I am more open and compassionate now because my years of experience have widened my horizons.  I am who I was thirty years ago, but on this and many issues my mind has changed.  I think differently about many personal, social, and theological issues now than I did when I was thirty, forty, or even fifty. That’s how life works. That’s how the life of faith works.

I also understand how Governor Romney could regret his high school behavior.  When I was in high school I didn’t bully or harass other kids, but I might as well have.  I had an acerbic sense of humor, and I often made thoughtless jokes at other kids’ expense. Over the years, as I’ve gone to reunions, some of my classmates have told me that many barbs I aimed at them were hurtful. They only feel free to tell me these things now, I think, because they sense I’m not as hard-edged today as I was then.  I hope they see me now as someone they can tell a hard truth to without getting blown back in return. Being asked to recall these events has ranged from embarrassing to painful, but I believe I’m the better for being invited into a deeper vision of what it means to be empathetically human.

President Obama and Governor Romney have both shown themselves open to the kind of change which life works on all of us. They’re in good company. When he apologized for anti-Semitic remarks he made during the 1984 Democratic Presidential primary season, The Reverend Jesse Jackson famously said as he apologized, “I am not a perfect servant. I am a public servant doing my best against the odds. As I develop and serve, be patient: God is not finished with me yet.” Human beings are dynamic, not static. The Christian life would be pointless if we were expected to get everything right all the time from the get-go.  Baptism does not make us perfect.  Baptism initiates us into a process of growth and change. We are constantly being formed, shaped, broken, and remade in the image of Jesus.  We are all works in progress.  God is not finished with any of us yet.

Our ongoing transformation is a spiritual process; sometimes artists can help us better than pastors to see it. Poets have long understood that life is dynamic, not static.  In “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction”, Wallace Stevens talks about a life principle he names “living changingness.” As critic Helen Vendler says, “For Stevens, to be alive was, above all, to change.” Human beings, like the creation itself, are always engaged in a ceaseless process of flux. In his poem “The Outpost”, the contemporary Swedish poet, 2011 Nobel laureate Tomas Tranströmer, described himself as “the place/Where creation is working itself out.”  It’s not just that we all grow and change.  It’s also that our growth and change are signs of deeper modulations going on at the heart of life itself. 

God is not finished with us yet.  None of us is fully yet the person God made us to be.  Thank God we can grow, evolve and change.  Thank God we can look at our past behavior and attitudes and feel something more than prideful self-justification. Remorse can be more than a guilt trip:  it can be a sign of growth, forgiveness, and hope. We are all in the process of being remade in the image of Christ. Let us give thanks for the constant inevitability of flux and change.
Gary Hall

Homily: The Sixth Sunday of Easter [May 13, 2012] Christ Church Cranbrook

            For us news junkies, there were plenty of headlines this week.  Voters in France and Greece threw out their governments.  J.P. Morgan Chase lost a couple of billion dollars.  President Obama changed his position on same sex marriage.  Governor Romney was reminded of some bad behavior in high school. As big as these stories were, however, they didn’t come close to the one that touched Kathy and me the most.  On Tuesday, Maurice Sendak, the celebrated children’s author and illustrator, died.  Sendak’s genius—displayed in books like Where the Wild Things Are and In the Night Kitchen-- was that he was able to tap into both the beautiful and terrifying parts of the child’s imagined world.  He believed, as I have come to believe, that where children are concerned, honesty is always the best policy. Both his parents were Holocaust survivors, but they never talked about their experience.  Sendak always regretted their reticence.  He said: "Do parents sit down and tell their kids everything? I don't know. I don't know. I've convinced myself — I hope I'm right — that children despair of you if you don't tell them the truth."

This week, NPR rebroadcast several interviews that Terry Gross did with Sendak over the years on her program Fresh Air. Here is my favorite anecdote—a story about growing up as a Jew in a multi-ethnic New York neighborhood:

And we lived in a part of Brooklyn which was teeming with immigrants, either other people from Eastern Europe, Jews - or Sicilians, and I couldn't tell the difference. . . . We lived next to the Sicilians  . . . And I used to run across the hall because they had un-Kosher food, which was much better, much better than Kosher food because it was - it was pasta. It was great Italian cooking. And they laughed, and they drank wine, and they grabbed me, and I sat on their laps, and they had a hell of a good time. And then you come back to my house and you have this sober cuisine and not so rambunctious family life. And I really did have a confusion that Italians were happy Jews, that they were a sect. And that I would have a choice - that I would have a choice after my bar mitzvah to belong to either the sober sect or the happy sect. [Fresh Air 2003 Interview, published May 8, 2012]

            Now this may strike you as a curious way to begin a Mother’s Day sermon, but Maurice Sendak’s announcement that “children despair of you if you don't tell them the truth," along with his exuberant childhood verdict that “Italians were happy Jews”—both these observations strike me as profound insights about the pain and joy of being human, and they remind us that the Gospel’s truth comes to us precisely within, and not in spite of, the deep truths regarding the stuff of life.  Samuel Johnson said, “Love is the wisdom of fools and the folly of the wise.”  If that’s true, then we see love’s foolish wisdom enacted most obviously within the sphere of the family. That does not mean that our earthly mothers and fathers are perfect.  But it does mean that it is possible for us, even amid evidences of parental imperfection, to discover the depth and breadth and height of what it means both to love and be loved.

            Today is the Sixth Sunday of Easter, a day on which we continue to live into the resurrection and its implications for our lives.  Today is coincidentally Mother’s Day, a holiday our culture sets aside to honor mothers and to thank all of those who, of whatever gender, have nurtured us on our life’s path.  As we gather on this Sunday, I invite you to think about Mother’s Day from a new perspective, from Jesus’s angle of vision.  We often tend to use this day as a time to think about our own mothers, to remember their strengths and shortcomings, and to recall how we have either been cared for or neglected as we grew into maturity.  Today I would like to ask us to reverse that process, and to think not so much about how we have been mothered but rather about what kind of mothers we--both women and men--can be ourselves.  As Jesus says in today’s Gospel, “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another.  Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.”  At the heart of God’s call to follow Jesus is a call to be a giver, a doer of love.  If Mother’s Day makes any sense to us at all in 2012, it does so as a warrant for loving engagement with those we find in our own households and beyond.

            The adult Jesus did not live in a nuclear family.  Instead, he gathered a community of companions—men and women who shared his ministry and his table. It was a new kind of community:  egalitarian, mutual, and compassionate. It rejected the hierarchical social arrangements of both Rome and Palestinian Judaism. In today’s Gospel reading we hear Jesus tell his companions what the most important aspect of life in this new community must be.  He tells them, “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another.  Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.”  Jesus does not mean this in any sentimental way.  In saying that his companions should love one another, Jesus is setting out the most important quality of any household.  A family, a Christian community--these are fellowships held together not merely by common ancestry, associations, values, or goals.  What makes a family or a household Christian is the presence of love.  The kind of love Jesus talks about is the kind of love witnessed in his love for his companions.  “Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.”  Love, in Jesus’s terms, has little to do with warm, gooey feelings.  Love, in Jesus’s terms, has everything to do with acting--either in wise folly or foolish wisdom--on behalf of another, with putting another’s welfare first, with seeing another’s happiness and well-being as central to one’s own.  “Love one another as I have loved you” is at once the noblest and hardest commandment there is.  A family is a place where people may disagree, may argue, may not even like each other at times.  A family can be exuberant or sober. But a family is a place where the highest and most authentic kind of human love can bloom because it is a place where parents and children--as complicated as their relationships may be--it’s a place where parents and children can enact their deep and improbable love for one another.

            So as we think about Jesus and his companions and what they have to say to us on Mother’s Day, the first point is this:  our job, as Jesus says, is to love each other the way he has loved us.  Speaking to each of us as adults, Jesus suggests that our job is to love each other the way parents love their children:  selflessly, sacrificially, sometimes foolishly.  Speaking to each of us as children, Jesus means that our job is to love each other the way children love their parents:  trustingly, creatively, generously.  On a day when our culture asks us to be thankful of and respectful towards our mothers, our Gospel goes us one better:  it asks us all to see ourselves as mothers, to realize that if we want to follow Jesus and know God, the surest way to do that is to be agents of generous, selfless, risky love.  To some extent each of our earthly parents lets us down:  no human being can ever live up to the expectations which we as children project on them.  But the way forward to a free and joyous and abundant life does not involve trying to make up for all the nurture we may not have gotten when we were small.  The way forward into hope and happiness lies precisely through the hearts of those whom God has given us to love in the here and now.  “Love one another as I have loved you” is not just a commandment, it is a gift.  We repair our hearts not by revisiting the past but by reaching out in the present.  We are all of us called, this Mother’s Day, both to thank those who have nurtured us, and to forgive those who haven’t.  But more than that: we’re called to live out God’s love towards those we encounter in the here and now.  In following that commandment, we will be given a joy and peace which transcend whatever it is we may not have gotten in the first place.

“Love is the wisdom of fools and the folly of the wise.” We are gathered this morning both as a human community and as a group of Christians who seek transformation into the joyful risen image of Jesus Christ. The One in whose name we gather has given us a new commandment:  we are to love one another, just as he has loved us.  The first thing that means, as I have said, is that we are all called to be loving mothers of each other, just as our own mothers, and Jesus in his own way have lovingly mothered us.  And here’s the second thing that means:  that along with Jesus and his companions, we are being asked by God--no, we’re being commanded by God--to expand the circumference of the circles we would draw around our families, our community, our world.  “Love one another” is not just a commandment for the household, the church, or those with our values.  Jesus’s commandment is not a demand that we love those who are like us, genetically, politically, or culturally.  Jesus’s commandment is a demand that we break open those circles, that we seek to mother not only those near us but those who are far off:  the people in our workplace, the people in our city, the children in our schools, even those who look and act like our enemies.  Only a dose of the most authentic love, the love which children and parents have for each other, will redeem and transform our community, our nation, and our world.

Whether you live in a family that hides or tells the truth, whether you inhabit a household of somber or happy people, love will continue to be the wisdom of fools and the folly of the wise.  May each and all of us, in the wisdom of our folly, and in the foolishness of our wisdom, love each other as mothers love their children, as Jesus loves his companions, as his companions have gone on to love and serve each other and the world.  In so doing we will be acting as Jesus would act in a broken world.  In so doing we will be following, finally, the only commandment we have that really matters.  Amen.

The Communicant, Christ Church Cranbrook, [May 13, 2012]

Mother’s Day and Jesus’s Mother, Mary

This Sunday is Mother’s Day, an important cultural observance though not a religious one.  Mother’s Day began in the 19^th century as part of the women’s movement that included Temperance and Women’s Suffrage.  The original idea behind was that if the mothers of the world could come together in common cause, war as they knew it then would cease.

Those hopes proved unfounded, and the day found a new focus:  the celebration of motherhood itself.  For us Christians, of course, the major image we have of motherhood is Jesus’s mother, Mary.

It’s important to remember that Mary was both Jesus’s mother and his faithful follower.  She was present both at the Bethlehem stable and the Calvary cross.  She saw the one she bore in all aspects of his life:  precious child, precocious boy, adult teacher and healer, prophet of love and justice, dying crucified Savior.

The English essayist Francis Bacon once said, “The joys of parents are secret; and so are their griefs and fears.”  Anyone who has ever read John Irving’s novel, The World According to Garp, remembers the vivid scenes in which the hero chases speeding cars through his neighborhood because of his protective anxiety about children at play.  The great joy of parenthood is the way it bestows on you the gift of someone whom you may unreservedly love.  The fear of it is that once you love this new person, you are also vulnerable and exposed in ways you hadn’t been before.  There is no greater joy than being a parent.  There is nothing scarier, either.

“The joys of parents are secret; and so are their griefs and fears.”  Tradition tells us that Mary and Joseph were exemplary parents. They nurtured and preserved Jesus from danger.  They allowed him to grow into the loving, generous, prophetic adult he became. Real parenting--be it by mothers or fathers--consists in the balanced artistry of nurture and independence.  Only as children are loved and supported and embraced do they become secure enough to adventure out into adult freedom.  Only as children are pushed out do they become independent enough authentically to love their parents, and the world, in return.  The job of the parent is to put herself or himself out of business.  The job of the parent is to prepare the child, and oneself, for a new kind of relationship.  It’s a great joy, and also a great grief.

As we celebrate Mother’s Day this year, let us use it as a day on which to honor all those nurturers—our mothers, of course, but also our fathers, siblings, friends, and mentors—who have helped us become the people we are.  Parenting is a mixture of joy and grief.  Mary has gone there before us.  Our parents have too.  May we have grace to love those in our charge in ways that will both nurture and challenge them.

Gary Hall

The Rector's Monday Message: May 7. 2012

"When God Talks Back, Do You Feel Like a Heretic?"

One of the real frustrations of being a priest in the 21^st century is that the press no longer understands what it is we religious people do and believe.  In this respect, most religious reporting is akin to science reporting:  the reporters usually don’t understand the story they’re writing.  Religion and science, after all, are not the premiere beats.  The only good stories you ever hear about the Episcopal Church come when we’re fighting each other.

Usually, theologically thoughtful people have to look elsewhere than the newspaper to find informed discussions of religious questions.  But last Sunday, The New York Times Book Review disproved my theory by running two articles discussing books on religion.  The first was a review of When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship With God by T. M. Luhrmann. The second treated Ross Douthat’s Bad Religion:  How We Became a Nation of Heretics. Together these new books provide a window into the American religious landscape usually invisible both to reporters and those of us who talk about God for a living.

The first book, When God Talks Back, is the result of a long study by T. M. Luhrmann, a psychological anthropologist at Stanford.  Luhrmann studied Evangelical spirituality by joining two Megachurch congregations—one in California, one in Illinois.  What she discovered was a world in which pastors encourage congregants to make dates with God—pouring an extra cup of coffee in the morning, walking down to the park and sitting with Jesus in the evening.  Far from being dismissive of these practices, Luhrmann says (in the reviewer’s words) that Evangelicals “believe in an intimate God who talks to them personally because their churches coach them in a new theory of mind. In these communities, religious belief is ‘more like learning to do something than to think something. . . . People train the mind in such a way that they experience part of their mind as the presence of God.’” The review goes on,

Evangelical prayer is much more than mumbled grace at dinnertime. As Luhrmann writes, “God wants to be your friend; you develop that relationship through prayer; prayer is hard work and requires effort and training; and when you develop that relationship, God will answer back, through thoughts and mental images he places in your mind, and through sensations he causes in your body.” Evangelicals have drawn on the insights of modern psychotherapy and ancient traditions of spiritual formation to learn to pray in a way that transforms their minds and — they believe — has astonishing power in real life. [“A Great Awakening”by Molly Worthen, The New York Times Book Review, April 29, 2012]

When God Talks Back should be of interest to all of us attempting to develop an ongoing, deep relationship with God.  While I’m not the kind of person likely to have coffee or a jog with Jesus, I do find something appealing about the straightforwardness of the Evangelical approach to conversations with God.  We Prayer Book Episcopalians tend to think of prayer as our speaking (in very felicitous phrases, of course) and God listening.  But prayer is as much about our listening as it is about God’s talking.  It’s a relationship. My own relationship with God coheres around the liturgy and Bible reading (Eucharist and the Daily Office).  I want to say “yes” to the Evangelical practice of personal intimacy with God, but I want to raise a yellow flag of caution: absent a disciplined liturgical, biblical structure, how do I know that the voice I hear talking back to me is really God’s? 

The second book, Ross Douthat’s Bad Religion, treats a different set of questions.  Two thirds of it is a cranky lament for the good old days when mainline (Christian) churches dominated the religious landscape.  Those days are gone forever, and the picture Douthat paints of them is rather rosier than what obtained at the time.  There never really was a mainline consensus.  The reviewer reminds us that Reinhold Niebuhr snubbed Billy Graham’s crusades, that Billy Graham avoided Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and that for all his popularity in the 1950s, even Bishop Fulton J. Sheen couldn’t stop right-wing Protestants from expressing anti-Catholic sentiments when John F. Kennedy ran for President in 1960. Nevertheless, Douthat is on to something when he laments the way spirituality has been personalized and “interiorized”.  In the reviewer’s words:

The plunge into heresy, Douthat believes, can be traced to theological developments like the revisionist Jesus Seminar and the unlikely trinity of Elaine Pagels, Bart Ehrman and Dan Brown. Douthat accuses them of discrediting Christian orthodoxy in the interests of remaking Jesus in their own image, often for political ends. Debunking the debunkers, Douthat concludes that “they speak the language of the conspiratorial pamphlet, the paranoid chain e-mail — or the paperback thriller.” The currency of these ideas has given rise to what the author calls the “God Within” movement. “A choose-your-own-Jesus mentality,” Douthat writes, “encourages spiritual seekers to screen out discomfiting parts of the New Testament and focus only on whichever Christ they find most congenial.” [“Breaking Faith” by Randall Balmer, The New York Times Book Review, April 29, 2012]

I disagree strongly with Douthat’s illusory picture of a happy, consensual bygone American religious landscape.  Even in the 1950s and 1960s, you and I would have been considered “heretics” by most hyper-orthodox (Catholic and Evangelical) Christian establishments.  So to call us a “nation of heretics” now seems more like revanchist name-calling than thoughtful analysis. 

Nevertheless, these books remind us both of the breadth and depth of contemporary American religious experience and of the need we always have to ground our experience in openness to voices from outside ourselves.  When I go for coffee with God, is it all about me, or do I hear anything about my need to love, care for, and forgive others?  When I choose my own Jesus, do I hear him telling me to sit down at the table with lepers, prostitutes, and the outcasts of the world? 

If all I hear in my personal prayer life is about me, then perhaps it’s time I picked up the Bible and the newspaper.  The next time you make a date with God, bring more than a cup of coffee or your nostalgic dreams of a glorious Christian past.  Open the Bible, open the newspaper, and open your heart to the One who speaks in and through the pains and joys of the world.

Gary Hall

The Rector's Monday Message: April 30, 2012

 “Keeping Ourselves from Ourselves”

Last week I heard an interview with actor Frank Langella discussing his new memoir Dropped Names: Famous Men and Women as I Knew Them. Frank Langella comes across as both a wise and interesting man, and something he said during the conversation has stayed with me all week. He was talking about how the famous people he met when younger, as they got older had (in his words)  “a deep and profound terror, and so kept holding on to all the outside things, all the toys we use to keep ourselves from ourselves” [“sex appeal, pills, booze”], so that “as they got older and older and older there was very little center in any of them, very little sense of self.”  He then went on,

The Eastern philosophy is whenever you feel nervous or scared, throw something out of your box, if you’re a box. Those of us here in this culture keep packing our boxes with things like fame, like money, like success, so as we get closer to death we’re very heavy, we’re weighted with all those things. [New York Times Book Review Podcast, April 20, 2012]

I found Langella’s remarks compelling on several fronts.  Since both my parents worked in show business, I spent much of my early life around famous people.  I know from my experience of those years the truth of Langella’s analysis of the corrosive aspects of fame.  Over the course of the rest of my life, though, I’ve consorted with many people who, while not famous, have been highly successful in some area of human endeavor—business, the academy, the church.  And I know from my relationships with those folks that success—even ecclesiastical success—is never finally enough.  We spend much if not most of our lives pursuing success, and when we achieve it we pause, look around, and realize that even success does not ultimately satisfy our deepest needs. And so we find external things that will help “to keep ourselves from ourselves”. For some of us those things are toxic relationships.  For others they are toxic substances.  Whatever they are, they keep us from personal authenticity and depth.

This week I’ve also been rereading one of my favorite books on the life of prayer:  English Spirituality, by Martin Thornton.  This book dates from the early 1960s and is now long out of print.  Thornton, a Church of England priest and pastoral theologian, wrote a history of English spirituality in order to show how Anglican worship and prayer had their own unique, sensible, pragmatic characteristics, rooted in the Benedictine tradition of monastic prayer, study, and worship.

Here is what Thornton says about Benedict’s understanding of the relevance of monastic vows to the lives of everyday people.  In Benedict’s understanding,  “obedience, poverty, and chastity are not monastic but Christian virtues”.  What he means is that these virtues are the virtues not just of monks and nuns but, understood properly, of all Christian people.  All of us are called to be obedient, poor, and chaste.  As to obedience:  “obedience is to be ‘according to the Rule’; what we might call canonical obedience, holy obedience, or even loyalty, but not servile submission.”  Poverty “consists in keeping a happy mean between rigorism and laxity.”  And chastity “is both a practical monastic rule and a general Christian virtue, applicable to both married and single alike”.  [Martin Thornton, English Spirituality, pp. 79-80]

I have always found Thornton’s explanation of the monastic virtues deeply helpful in understanding my own attitude toward life’s desires and challenges.  As Frank Langella says, we have a choice.  As we grow and mature, we can either put more things into our box or take more things out of them.  The culture we live in tends to exalt grasping, consumption, and excess as the signs of the fulfilled life.  Rome was not that different than the First World of the 21^st century, and its temptations and blandishments were pretty much the ones we’re offered these days, too.  There is, though, another way. Jesus, the one we follow, lived under Rome’s shadow, and his life and teaching suggest that our true fulfillment consists in going in the opposite direction from putting more stuff in the box.

Live simply.  Live compassionately.  Live thankfully.   That’s how Jesus lived.  He gathered a group of companions who shared that mode of life, and they were able to experience, celebrate, and share a joyful abundance in living that they could not otherwise have imagined.  As you and I contemplate the myriad invitations we have to accumulate things that keep ourselves from ourselves, we hear as well Jesus’s invitation to throw the things out of our boxes that draw us from knowing ourselves and so from knowing God.  Poverty, chastity, and obedience may not sound as alluring as fame, power, and success, but don’t just trust me, trust Jesus: their benefits exceed all that we can ask for or imagine.  Living as Jesus lived, our boxes may be empty, but our lives will be full.

Gary Hall