Remember

A prayer of eternal rest for those who perished in the
atrocities of 9/11/2001, and grateful contemplation
of Innocents and Martyrs in every place and time.

Taking Care of Business

Yesterday I heard so-called "news" (for the 6th or 8th time) that the Recession will be deeper and longer than originally expected. While I value the need for factual reporting of economic news, I doubt that a prolonged emphasis on negative details is healthy. Bad news will still be there, whether we repeat it or not. Repeating may serve less to inform, than to remind us to be discouraged, or fretful, or depressed.
Will our future be built on worry that our shortcomings will lead to our failure, or on hope that our strengths will outlast adversity? Reports of negative news will not cease, but we can remind ourselves to be hopeful, as we focus on positive things that do not change: our assets of talent, resolve, and innovation; and the shared energy of love and community.

Reluctant Redemption

During the Christian season of Lent, a scriptural resource that forms a central theme is Psalm 51. It seems that the psalmist has been looking into our business as he writes, "I know my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me," and "Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me." This psalm remains one of the most popular, during Lent and throughout the year, because it expresses humankind's timeless hope of salvation.

But do we truly accept the Easter gift: the supreme atonement offered for us by Christ, in fulfillment of that hope? Christ's sacrifice for sin was made once and for all, still we inflict on ourselves the weight of judgment and the burden of guilt. We suspect that eternal damnation is waiting for us based on every word of gossip that we speak. We fear that we may have to wait in line for eternal life while St. Peter reviews every time we cut someone off in traffic. We continually say, "I was bad," to describe everything from eating a piece of cake to spending too much money on our clothes.

We find it hard to escape the images of a God of wrath lying in wait for us to make mistakes, lightening bolt in one hand and express ticket to eternal fire in the other. We acknowledge our unworthiness and our undeserving, without moving on to accept the mercy, love, and grace of Jesus' taking our place. If God can forget our sins, why can't we?

God decided we were worth saving, not as a reward for our goodness, rather as an investment in our greatness. Not that one of us is greater than another, rather that we all are children of God, and God sees in every one of us the potential to create in us, with us, and through us something truly great. Right now God is using someone's talent to create a composition of art or music; moving a small group to design an offering of worship that leads others to Christ; activating in a young woman the compassionate listening that delivers friends from despair; moving the heart of a believer to a moment of praise and prayer.

Just as we confess our sins, those breaks in our relationship with God, how about listing among them our reluctance to claim the life of promise that Christ's atonement makes possible? Let this Lenten season be a time of repentance and also of real renewal – of claiming with Christ the path that leads to God's creation of new life for all.

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Over our heads

Overheard on a plane in 1995: "You start getting money, then you start living the money, then the money's got YOU."

Grounds for Separation

In the current swirl of turmoil that has so many people whipped into a lather, or just plain whipped, why focus on worry over the latest dire predictions? Why not separate from the hysteria of the mainstream?

Focus instead on what has not changed: the constancy of God; the wonder of creation; the opportunities for service; the abundance of new chances at survival that come with living one more moment.

The French roots of the word survive (sur + vivre) mean to "live over." Isn't that what we all want, to transcend mundane fear and step over the paralyzing quicksand of despair? I think so.

This Lent, don't just give up, take on!

During the Lenten season that starts this Wednesday, why not take on a meaningful discipline that will enrich your daily life and may continue to do so beyond the 40 days plus Sundays? Here are a few suggestions:

• Make a list of people and places, events and things that are important to you, and focus on one entry each day in prayer. (You'll need 46 items to cover Ash Wednesday through Holy Saturday.) Possible sources: your address book; Christmas cards received last year; your church directory; photos on your shelves or computer; your e-mail contact list; favorite cities and vacation spots; colleagues and merchants with whom you do business; friends and mentors from the past; in-laws and neighbors; your friends' parents; your parents' friends.....
  
  
• Before each Sunday, read and meditate on the appointed lectionary readings. At church, notice how the elements of the service – music, sermon, and prayers – carry out the theme. Perhaps write a few notes in your worship bulletin to remind you of your impressions. After church, find some time to reflect, noting topics you'd like to research or discuss. A great resource is http://divinity.library.vanderbilt.edu/lectionary/
  
  
• Get a blank book or a stack of large index cards. (An inexpensive spiral-bound children's sketch book works perfectly.) At the close of each day, divide one page into four quadrants: draw one line down the center vertically, and one across the center horizontally. Using the four sections, list something you experienced or achieved that day from each of these four categories:
  
  1) something I gave to or did for another;
  2) something I learned or created;
  3) a gift or blessing I received;
  4) a concern I release to God.
  
  You may choose to write more or less, as time and inspiration dictate.
  
  
• Go on a diet from negative thoughts.* Fill your mind instead with positive affirmations, either through Bible verses or your own words. Write such useful phrases on eye-appealing cards, and keep them in a small basket on your desk or wherever you often could use some "redirection."
  
  
• Just as you address God with thanks and praise before you offer your humble petitions, begin with a word of praise or thanks before any time you offer someone a word of critique or revision. Continue this discipline beyond Lent, forever.
  
  
• Forgive, forgive, forgive. Forgive others for wrongdoing against you, both blatant and perceived. Forgive people for not fulfilling the ideals you've projected onto them. Forgive yourself for letting yourself down. Forgive, forgive, forgive. By all means, don't shy away from standing up for yourself wherever you can work for a just resolution. But after hurts and slights have long since turned into lingering, crippling baggage, let it go. If God can pour salvation onto our broken world, why must we persist in passing sentence? Take a break from the judgement seat and accept your role as an agent of God's healing grace.

__________

*For the idea of going "on a diet from negative thoughts," thanks to the great metaphysical writer Louise L. Hay.

Bridge Out

What a wild ride the past few weeks have been. My computer crashed, cutting off my usual command center. At the same time, an old friend, lately out of touch but eternally dear at heart and permanently iconic in my life story, died suddenly at age 53. It's as though the expected bridge from a few weeks ago to now was washed out and I've taken a detour, one day's walk at a time.

Isn't this what we all do? Even at the times when we presume to plan our days and weeks, even when the auto-pilot of ordinary days suffices to take us from morning to night and back again, an infinity of variables is at play. In the words of a wonderful old speech, we walk in ways we know not. We take a step and seek guidance, take another step and thank God for being sustained. In an environment where our own vision is inadequate, faith reaches forward to grip the opposite cliff.

On Wednesday we'll enter the season of Lent, a time weighed down with traditions of moping along to the tune of a dismal dirge, and of sacrificially giving things up for the 40 days, often replacing them with a pitiful air of deprivation instead of an intensely private discipline of self-denial. It's easy to end up resenting the whole experience.

I prefer instead to address Lent as a journey. On a broad scale, it's a time to take a step and give thanks, take another step and seek guidance, reach beyond ourselves to grasp with faith something beyond our vision.

Jane Stimpert White

IN FOND REMEMBRANCE OF
Jane Stimpert White

(1955-2009)

O let the Son of God enfold you
With His Spirit and His love,
Let Him fill your heart and satisfy your soul.
O let Him have those things that hold you,
And His Spirit like a dove
Will descend upon your life and make you whole.

O come and sing this song with gladness
As your hearts are filled with joy,
Lift your hands in sweet surrender to His name.
O give Him all your tears and sadness,
Give Him all your years of pain,
And you'll enter into life in Jesus' name.

Jesus, O Jesus, come and fill Your lambs,
Jesus, O Jesus, come and fill Your lambs.

More about life and survival

Our cheerleading for the California octuplets to join us in this life has made me think of another situation.

In the course of my work as a church organist, one of the most sensitive situations I've been called upon to serve was the memorial service for an infant who survived only part of one day. The gathering was small – close family only.

Before the service, I stopped to offer at least the formality of condolence for a situation nobody but those people could fully imagine. I found myself alone with the pastor and the father of the little infant who had passed. I did not ask him for details. However, perhaps to offer polite conversation, perhaps to give an account of his daughter's life and make it worth something, perhaps just out of the exhausted energy of the bereaved, the young father carefully narrated for me the series of events around his daughter's birth and her brief day of life.

After the chronology – those events that took their factual, indelible place in time – he continued into a second phase. He went on to say that, as an engineer, he had trouble making peace with the failure of systems that seemed to be in working order. Whereas the factual section could not be denied, I perceived that this pondering section was no less a part of the retelling that was now habitual, but it was the part that kept bouncing off an impenetrable wall of painful confusion.

For some reason, I opened my mouth and said this: for as much as human beings are essentially organisms of soft tissue and water, shocked into life, raised often in adversity and risk, stumbling forward through life for years and years on end, the big surprise isn't that we sometimes succumb to inherent human weakness and die. The miracle is that we survive at all.

At the seams of life and death, we stand less on mechanics and yield more to mystery.

Eight is more than enough

I'm moved and excited to read about the octuplets who were born in California on Monday. As of the latest report, all of them were breathing on their own. News sources are saying that only one other occurrence is documented of octuplets all surviving their birth; of those siblings, one infant survived for only a few days, and the other seven grew and thrived to celebrate their tenth birthday in 2008.

Amid all the angst and uncertainty around the economy and questions of whether we'll survive this or that challenge, guess what? Meanwhile we've lived another day. Those eight little folks in California are a testimony to the life force that is in all of us.

Color My World

Listening to Barack Obama’s inaugural address yesterday, I was not surprised to be impressed and satisfied, challenged and hopeful. It conveyed his affirmation of commitment to the life that we all will create together. It defined the relationship into which we were entering in a ceremony that amounted to the marriage of our vast citizenry to its chosen groom.

Very slowly, over several months, this now-president has challenged my abandonment of wanting any kind of leader, by proposing a contract of mutual respect that his speech on Tuesday served to finalize. I was not surprised that his message was an intelligent, relational, and genuine one, rather than an indoctrinating train of misplaced logic based on foregone agreements arrogantly assumed.

Still there was for me, midway through the speech, a surprise. By listing together, in one sweeping series, those who "for us ... toiled in sweatshops, and settled the West, endured the lash of the whip, and plowed the hard earth," he merged histories that even my generally egalitarian mind had held separate—of black and white, theirs and ours—into the shared journey of one people.

What met me as something unexpected was not the approach he took or the topics he visited, but instead a message of true community that transcended even his eloquent prose to effect a subtle reframing of my mind.

One Nation

Chilling Out

The question I ask is probably square one of introductory anthropology, and anyone in that field already knows the answer, but in these days of single-digit temperatures, I have to wonder why human beings ever began spending time in cold climates, let alone settling in them.

Our original, unclothed ancestors must have been born into warmth. During periods of variation from the ideal temperature, seeking relief in water, shade under vegetation, or shelter in caves would have provided all the defense they needed. But why on earth did it ever seem like a good idea to struggle against freezing temperatures, snow, and ice to find food and keep warm enough to live?

Once curiosity had made us venture from our tropical base, was it just easier to build a fire and set up camp than to trace our steps back home? Or can it be that the satisfaction of survival is so gratifying that, on some level, it’s worth the struggle?

Life and Times

Once again I’ve heard someone say that it was a person’s time to die; that a horrific and untimely accident and all its consequences must have been part of God’s plan.

I’ve never been comfortable with the explanation that God pulls people off the shelf like expired milk, or visits trial and torture to test our faith. Death and illness don’t ask God if it’s okay to claim our bodies any more than thieves ask God if it’s okay to rob us.

Yes, God designed all of life, wherein illness is a factor of basic mortal weakness, and exposures to evil and risk come with the human condition. But in the passing of each momentary situation, how can we believe that God pulls the trigger or picks up a red phone and orders suffering and demise?

Through the struggles and mysteries of life, I prefer to think of God being on my side – the comforter and sustainer rather than an enigmatically benevolent oppressor. I came from God, and one day I will return to a state of pure spirit with God. During this walk on earth, I am divided from God only by my embodiment in the physical world.

The test in life is to open our enduring spirits ever more broadly and deeply to sharing this phase of life with a God who is closer than our breath. The challenge is to maintain a life in and through the spirit that the physical world cannot overcome.

Write On

Over the weekend I began working on a new writing assignment, a page for the daily devotional guide my church will produce for Lent. With the first days of 2009 already flown into the past, Ash Wednesday (February 25) will be here before we know it.

Each one of us numerous writers has been given scriptures assigned to a specific date, according to the daily lectionary, and asked to return a brief meditation and a prayer for the day. This model has been extremely successful and popular; the current project is the third seasonal publication of its kind in two years.

I highlight this project for two reasons. One is to celebrate the gifts and wisdom of our particular congregation, that allow them to share insights that inspire and sentiments that resonate with so many who read them.

The second is to point out that, given a set of text or presented with a situation (an assignment; a challenge), somehow we can all make a connection or draw on lessons learned, to share a story of our common journey that is authentic and worthy.

Key Players

My use of the term "keyplayer" is familiar to a lot of people, since I've been using it in addresses for several years. But beyond making my blog address memorable by matching it to screen names, there is more behind my selection.

My first and most obvious basis for the term "keyplayer" is my having played the piano since age 5 and the organ since 13. Playing keys has been one of my most active and obvious means of contributing to the world. The tag "123" reflects musical counting that goes along with the keyplaying.

Beyond these transparent references is a broader meaning that is just as personal: identifying my role as a "key player" in all of my world -- not just a self-congratulating assertion of my own importance, but moreso an acknowledgment that each person is a key player worthy of respect, of cultivating one's own talents, and of offering one's gifts. I hope that through my directing, leading, and mentoring, I always make this clear.

As human beings, we are animally programmed to scan the environment for danger: a survival tactic that, in the extreme, can leave one dwelling in negativity. Culturally, we're told to know our limitations, keep our place, and focus on practicality in order to guarantee our basic needs. As key players, we claim our right to embody our best selves, to embrace whatever talents and passions we uniquely can offer, and to transcend the limitations of others' expectations.

Often our frustration grows not from our falling short of external patterns for us, rather from our neglecting to sense and reveal who we are.

Where to begin...

I've had it in mind for months to write a blog, but I could never decide how to start.

To others who have good intentions but question how to proceed, my unsolicited advice is always to start in the middle and work one's way out. My purpose in that is to relieve the pressure of ordering and outlining and let expression find its own place.

I have trouble adopting that advice for myself. If I don't know exactly what to do and don't have the entire overview of what will result, I don't begin. Maybe "begin" isn't even the right word. I always begin, and the progress exists in ever-expanding volume in my mind, behind the floodgate. What I don't do is document, share, release something into play, and let the work show me where it wants to go.

So today I asked myself to get out of the way ... and here we are.

Happy New Year and happy reading!