Thursday, April 19, 2018

FUTURE-FEAR - PART I - Dealing with the Past

TIME AND TIME AGAIN

Time has no intrinsic substance; no force, per se, that can be substantively manipulated. Time is merely a conceptual tool for measuring the rate of movement and the measurement of decay from the point of view of a select moment in time.

The past, as we use it, is a compilation of recollections of a nonexistent present.  The present is nothing more than a series of elusive moments that quickly become conceptualized as the past.  The future is a compilation of  anticipatory moments conceptualized as not yet realized.  In terms of linear time, the future decays to the present and the present decays to the past with the past being the place of no-time, eventually becoming the point where time runs out, the point of singularity.

It is important to keep these definitions in mind, because we tend to imbue time with a force it does not possess.  The fact is we  humans are obsessed with measurements. We can't help it.  It's what we do.  After all, we're the differentiators, the namers of things, the measure-ers of them, the ultimate discriminating animals who identify same and different, and we struggle mightily with all of that. To that end, we have come to identify time as a measurement and differentiate it into past, present, and future, moment by moment.

Time is one of humanity's greatest conceptual achievements that almost all humans accept as a real entity in our lives. What we consider the force of time is in actuality movement.  We're always moving.  We're always active even if we sit still; we're still moving and wearing out. We see this in everything around us and we feel it in ourselves. At the same time, we experience movement as heading towards something, which we call the future.  While we wear away, we anticipate that more shall come after us.

This differentiation of time into its various categories of past, present, future, seconds, minutes, hours, days weeks, years, eras, seasons, etc. has given it a hold on our perceptions and cognitive capabilities. Time captivates the human imagination as a reality we cannot escape until, perhaps, we're dead.  Even then, the living mark the graves and memorialize the deceased by measuring the span of deceased's life as a moment in time and celebrate events of a loved one's life as if they're still subject to time.

PUDDLING THE PAST

Our relationship to time is largely bipolar.  When thinking of time, we largely think of the past and the future.  The present almost always gets us to think about where we've been and where we're headed.  Our minds rarely stay put in the present.

Of the two poles, the past appears the easiest to comprehend.  We may not adequately know where we're at in historical terms or where we're headed, but we think we know where we've been.  The polarity of time, however, is merely conceptual.  Past and future are not strict polar opposites.  They are  interrelated concepts, with the past casting a long shadow into the future.

The further back one looks at time, the more one tends to puddle events by confining them with generalized or specific dates and giving them distinct names like the Axial Period, the Dark Ages, Medieval Times, the Renaissance or the Enlightenment.  History is our attempt to domesticate time by categorizing the random and unpredictable feelings that we associate with time as illustrated in Dickens' opening  sentence in A Tale of Two Cities, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times... ."  Time is also domesticated by identifying events as recurrent seasons,  as illustrated in Ecclesiastes 3:1,  "For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven."  

 History does not preserve the past but rather it is an attempt to keep the collective memory of what has passed current.  There is no way to accurately replicate the past, no way to accurately capture what people at the time felt or thought about the events swirling around them as they occurred.  We can only speculate and reference them imaginatively through our own  present-day thoughts and experiences.

In fact, people who lived through a recent event; experienced it first-hand and can remember it as if it just happened cannot replicate it exactly because all the elements of the time in which it occurred no longer exist as they have moved on and memory becomes imbued with meaning very quickly which creates a curved lens through which recall occurs.  One's recall may be categorically accurate, but it can never replicate the exact experience because certain elements of that experience pass with the moment in which it occurred, which is a long way to say that memory can never produce an exact replication because time is not something that can be replicated and the human mind takes the million, if not billions, of pieces of information and stores them categorically.

Pragmatically speaking, time can only be recalled as the measurement of an event - "It started at this time and ended at this time" or "It took about so long."  In other words, we puddle the event in the context of time passed.   Memory is largely about meanings, and time, in recall, contributes to one's sense of meaning as a defining element.   Every historian knows this.

THE CURSE OF HISTORY AND THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT

There is a saying attributed to different people that goes something like "Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it." A historian, whose name I unfortunately cannot recall, made an intuitive adjustment to this statement by saying history repeats but not in like. This cautionary insight helps avoid the tendency to concretize the meanings of history as a binding cause and effect relationships, "If this happens then this must occur."  This type of thinking leads us to ignore the ever-elusive present.  When events occur there are perhaps millions, if not billions, of factors that affect it, that give it its particular flavor. 

The past, however, has a tremendous influence on how we interpret the present and how we forecast the future. We distill lessons from the puddles of the past that give definition to the events and situations of today and what we are looking for in the near future.  What is problematic in using the past to interpret the present and in forecasting the future is imprecision.  What comes to mind is the "butterfly effect,"  the possibility, if not the probability, that some isolated, unnoticed occurrence or series of occurrences creating a wave of causation that has a direct impact on current events.  In retrospect, some of these butterfly moments can be discovered in a generalized way, but most cannot.  

My cautionary approach to historical application is that humans are subject to engaging in self-fulfilled prophecies.  History is very important in understanding  where we've come from, but it is not prophetic.  It cannot tell us with any precision where we're headed.  Why we feel it does is because we can reference current events as being like past events.  The problem is that current events are not past events. They may recall a certain flavor, but they're not concocted the same way.

NOTHING NEW UNDER THE SUN

"The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun."  Ecclesiastes 1:9 KJV  

This verse from the Hebrew Scriptures has likely shaped much of the West's thinking about the historical relationship between past and future.  The fact is there have been  a number of new things under the sun since that was written: industrialization, locomotion, air travel, space travel, telecommunication, the internet, advances in medicine to mention a few.  What the "Teacher" was getting at and which is  relevant to this discussion is that humans haven't changed  much since that  time.  In  fact,  Ecclesiastes is a good read regarding the relativity of time in conjunction with the finitude of existence and the apparent immutability of human behavior.

But are we perpetually stuck with engaging in recurrent behaviors? 

Does the concept of time, particularly the past, confine us to behavioral patterns that we are destined to repeat?

The Teacher in Ecclesiastes seems to be saying yes.  For all practical purposes, this appears evident.  Human history appears nothing more than an exhibition of repetitious behaviors within the context of variable circumstances.  Our ability to scientifically examine the past, however, says maybe not; that repetition is merely a cog-like action in an expansive evolutionary system; that while we seem to behaviorally spinning our collective wheels, human behavior, in all probability, is slowly evolving.

What prevents us from seeing this, I believe, is our attraction, if not our addiction, to the past.  As individuals we have difficulty in letting go of our personal pasts, especially that which has wounded us in some way; the things done and left undone to us and the things we have done and  left undone to others.  One of the  Hebrew psalmists captured this sense of being wounded in Psalm 51:3, "For I acknowledge my transgressions: and my sin is ever before me."  The psalmist is not talking about the sin that will be committed but rather the sin that has been committed and about the person who cannot find a way around it.

I read somewhere that the ancient Greeks believed that the past is always in front of us; that the future comes from behind and sneaks up on us.  The psalmist reflects this sense of the future; that in looking ahead we look through the lens of the past and that it is our past behaviors that are projected ahead of us as we speculate the future, and for many, if not most, it paints a grim picture.    

Future-Fear, as I am using it in these posts, is connected to a fear of repeating the past or the past repeating itself.  Such fears are based on our knowledge of the past; that from this knowledge we know what we are capable of doing.  Unfortunately, what sticks most in our collective memories is not the good we have demonstrated a capacity for but rather the bad which has placed us on more than one occasion near the brink of universal devastation. One has only to read, listen to, or watch the news feeds to understand the validity of that statement; especially, as they relate to the recent past.  As a whole, we are instinctually prone to be wary of predation and it is that which prompts us to probe the past for predicates of the future.

The past also possesses an allure to go back to the way things once were; particularly if one finds the present uncomfortable or encounters changes that have or appear to have little reference to the past. I will explore this time-related phenomenon in future posts, but the allure of past is similar to the fear of repeating the past.  Both the allure and the fear of the past are illusionary.  Nothing from the past can be replicated.  The allure of the past is nothing more than a Siren's call that leads to stagnation and distortion of the present. Fearing what has occurred in the past as becoming a recurrent reality in the near future likewise serves to distort the lessons of the past; rendering them useless in understanding their application to the present.

Being from South Dakota, what comes to mind is weather forecasting as an example for the imprecision of using the past in predicting the future.  From the past experiences and the study of them, we are given models, contexts in which weather patterns develop and can, with some precision, define today's weather conditions, but as is often the case, these patterns do not hold true when it comes predicting the weather precisely over time, let's say a week's time.  That a storm is gathering in the previous week does not mean a storm will occur sometime this week, even though the historical pattern would indicate it happening.  This does not mean we don't pay attention to what the forecast is saying. To ignore a forecast is like ignoring the patterns of history and risk being caught in a situation that could have been avoided, but it also means that we keep an eye on the present and understand that what was forecast a week ago is not set in concrete that conditions change - that a butterfly, somewhere, can change the course of the Jet Stream and change the course of history. 

There will be more about the past as we look to present and then to future.

Until next time, stay faithful.

Thursday, April 12, 2018

LEX ORANDI, LEX CREDENDI - A HEART FIXED ON TRUE JOY

This homily was delivered in Christ Episcopal Church, Yankton, South Dakota on March 18, 2018 on the Fifth Sunday in Lent.
* * * * * * * * * *
Almighty God, you alone can bring into order the unruly wills and affections of sinners:  Grant your people grace to love what you command and desire what you promise; that, among the swift and varied changes of the world, our hearts may surely there be fixed where true joys are to be found; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.  Amen  

(The Collect for the Fifth Sunday in Lent, The Book of Common Prayer, The Church Hymnal Corporation, 1979, pg. 219)
Walking through the doors of this church or any church on any day; particularly, on day of worship like today is, in essence, an act of public confession. We are saying, “I am a sinner in need of redemption.”  
At the beginning of Lent, on Ash Wednesday, I presented a homily in which I said sin could be defined by one word: selfish.  I said that “Any term that can be suffixed with ‘ish’ is an indication that it’s not the real thing but rather an approximation that is less than real or presented as being more than what it is; therefore, sin is anything that approximates us; lessens who we truly are, or tries to make us look more than who we truly are.”  We have all, in some way or another and at some point or another, acted selfishly.  As the Apostle Paul wrote in his Letter to the Romans, “All have sinned and fallen short of the Glory of God.” [1]
In our collect for today, we acknowledge, that despite our selfishness God’s influence is pervasive; that God “alone can bring into order our unruly wills and affections. What this prayer indicates is that sin/selfishness does not nor cannot keep God at bay. God is always in search of the lost, and God comes running to meet the contrite in heart as Jesus taught in his parable of the Lost Sheep and the Prodigal Son.
In other words, God goes where we go to get us to the place where God is.
In this prayer, we ask for grace, the unmerited gift of God to love what God commanded, and what is it that God has commanded?  It is what Jesus summed up as the greatest commandant – to love that which God’s loves; to love our neighbors as ourselves, to love our enemies; in short, it is to love all that is in order to fully love God with all our hearts, souls, and minds.[2] 
In this prayer, we ask for grace to desire what God has promised, and what is it that God promised?  God’s promise is the restoration of creation and the redemption of humanity to the goodness in which and for which it was made.  In the Gospel of John, Jesus is depicted as putting the promise of God in these terms, “I came that they (all) may have life, and have it abundantly.”[3]  Several Sundays ago in a homily on a baptismal prayer we examined this sense of abundance in terms of finding the gift of joy and wonder in all of God’s works.[4]
In this prayer, we ask for grace that amidst the swift and varied changes of the world; our hearts are fixed; are anchored where true joys are to be found.  Each age, in which this prayer has been said; including our own, finds itself caught in the riptides and whirlpools of current events that are ever in flux. 
It is easy while walking on the troubled waters of the present to be caught up in its turmoil and like Peter to lose faith, to lose hope, and start caving inward, sinking into a deluded sense of self. It is so easy in such an environment to drown in a vision of a faithless, hopeless, and unloving world, to put on a truly dark lens that hides the reality of God’s love for the world we live in and that prevents us from seeing ourselves for who we truly are.
So where is true joy to be found?
Since I begin this series of homilies, I find so many of our collects and prayers mentioning the heart.  To the modern ear, all this talk about the heart may seem archaic, if not sentimental.
Why not talk about the mind? 
Isn’t the “heart” only a metaphor for what we now call the mind, our thoughts and our emotions? After all, isn’t it what we think, what we perceive as good and evil that gets us into trouble or keeps it out of it?
Undoubtedly, there is a connection between our thoughts and our troubles and joys. We know, scientifically, that there link between what we perceive, think, and feel. Scripture acknowledges this connection as noted in the commandment to love God with all one’s heart and all one’s mind. 
The heart and the mind are closely linked, but function differently.  Physically speaking, the heart feels and the mind perceives. 
Take the broad field of science, for example. As an engine of science, the mind perceives that it is limited to and by what questions it can answer as empirical fact.  It can answer when questions, where questions, what questions, and how questions, but the question that all the empirical sciences struggle with are the pure why questions; especially, the question why we exist – “Why anything?”
It’s at that point empirical science hits a wall, begins to unravel, and becomes vacuous. Any attempt to answer the why of existence causes the mind to enter the realm of speculation, philosophy, ontology, and theology.  Having said that, however, one thing both theologians and scientists can and most do agree on is that there is no scientific proof or disproof for the existence of God or why we exist, and this, I believe, is where the heart comes in.
Our minds recognize another way of knowing that comes by way of experience or feeling.  To know God is to feel God in some manner or another and that is why scripture and our prayers talk in terms of the heart. We know God, not because we know what God is, know how God is, or know where God is. We know God because we feel God and the feeling by which we know God is called love.
 Scripture tells us God is love,[5] and that feeling of love is centered in the core of our being, our soul, what we call the heart where our made-in-the-image-of-God-self resides.  Almost every personal encounter with God in scripture is conveyed through an experience which conveys the feeling of God’s presence. Read the Psalms, and consider the terms the apostle Paul uses to describe our relationship to God:  faith, hope, and love.  They are all feeling terms, and they are found in one form or another in every letter Paul wrote. 
Joy is a feeling. 
The mind doesn’t feel. The mind processes feelings; gives them a name, tells us where, what, and how we feel, but frequently can’t tell us why we feel the way we do.  We can think happy thoughts that lead to happy feelings or we can think bad thoughts that lead to bad feelings.
It is a scientific fact that our visceral feelings can affect the physical heart’s health. Scripture intuitively gets the importance of paying attention to what we feel as a matter of the heart more than the head. Scriptures gets it right when obeying the greatest commandment begins with the heart then moves through the totality of being to the mind, the agency by which we perceive and comprehend the joy and wonder of creation as an expression of God’s love.   
 As followers of Jesus, we have come to understand that our true joy is experienced in the immense parental love of God for all creation, a love we see in Jesus, a love we share with Jesus and with all God’s children. It is that love; that feeling of joy which anchors us against the tug of the swift and varied changes of the world.   When our hearts are fixed on the source of our true joy, God’s love for us and all creation, we can say with Paul:
For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”[6]
When we came into this house of worship this morning, we made a confession that we are sinful and in need of redemption.  When we leave this place, by God’s grace,  may we  feel sent into the world professing that faith and that hope which is fixed on our true Joy, the love of God we experience and feel in Christ Jesus.
Amen.



[1] Romans 3:23
[2] Deuteronomy 6:5
[3] John 10:10
[4] “The Book of Common Prayer,”  The Church Hymnal Corporation, New York, 1979, pg. 308
[5] 1 John 4:8
[6] Romans 8:38 & 39


Thursday, April 5, 2018

LEX ORANDI, LEX CREDENDI - THE INQUIRING AND DISCERNING HEART


This homily was delivered at Christ Episcopal Church in Yankton, South Dakota on February 18, 2018 on the First Sunday in Lent.

Not being raised an Episcopalian, one of the prayers that caught my attention when Kathy and I joined this church occurred when we witnessed our first baptism here. 

The prayer goes like this:

Heavenly Father, we thank you that by water and the Holy Spirit you have bestowed upon these your servants the forgiveness of sin, and have raised them to new life of grace.  Sustain them, O Lord, in your Holy Spirit.  Give them an inquiring and discerning heart, the courage to will and to persevere, a spirit to know and to love you, and the gift of joy and wonder in all your works.[1]

This quickly became one of my favorite prayers in The Book of Common Prayer.  Lex orandi, lex credendi (what we pray reflects our deepest beliefs), as intimated in this prayer, acknowledges that the heart is shaped by what it seeks and especially by what it finds to be true.

Questioning has not been held in high regard throughout much of the church’s history and remains so in some Christian churches.  Yet in the Anglican tradition, our tradition, we have a unique theological perspective that shapes our identity as Episcopalians.  The 16th century English Theologian, Richard Hooker, wrote:

“What scripture doth plainly deliver, to that the first place both of credit and obedience are due; the next whereunto, is what a man can necessarily conclude by force of Reason; after this, the voice of the church succeedeth”.[2]   

This has become known as the three-legged stool upon which Anglican theological perspective is derived: Scripture, Reason, and Tradition.  There were few Christian denominations at that time and since that time that have given human reason, by itself, a place of prominence in theological discernment and discourse. What makes us unique among the Christian family of denominations is that we honor the human faculty of reason as essential in discerning the will of God in the light of Scripture and by its reflective wisdom embedded in our traditions.

Two individuals baptized as Anglicans came to mind as I thought about this prayer:  Charles Darwin and Thomas Merton; both examples of individuals with an inquiring and discerning heart.

CHARLES DARWIN

Born to a free thinking father and a Unitarian mother, Charles was baptized in the Church of England, the Anglican Communion.  Before taking his fateful journey aboard the Beagle in which he weighed the plethora of possibilities why so many diverse life forms in the world exist, Darwin had seriously considered taking Holy Orders and becoming a curate in the Church of England.  In reading his life story, I came to appreciate the struggle he had with the knowledge he acquired; whether to publish his findings that he knew would cause controversy and put him in a spotlight he did not seek.   He sat on the knowledge his experiences gave him for decades and only published his famous “Origen of the Species” when friends pleaded with him to do so.  The weight of his reasoned discoveries and the inner conflict it caused him took a toll on his health.

Our understanding of the world was forever changed by his reasoning mind; his inquiring and discerning heart.  Advances in the field of medical science are largely traced to what he revealed.  Charles Darwin not only broadened our understanding of who we are and how we came to be and the world we live in, he also broadened our understanding of God.  While that may not have been his intent nor would he have thought it a result of his work, it certainly was an outcome of it; traceable to God’s intent working through him. His findings brought many religious communities, including our own, to rediscover the deeper meaning of their scriptures and their traditions in a new and brighter light.

In 2011, when Kathy and I took our daughters on a post-graduation tour of Ireland and Great Britain, we visited West Minister Abbey in London.  Appropriately, Charles Darwin, an admitted agnostic in later life, was laid to rest in its hallowed nave by a supporting church faithful in its vow to support him at his baptism. As I stood looking down on his tomb, a few steps from the elaborate tomb of Sir Isaac Newton in the north aisle, marked by a single marble slab bearing his name, I could not help but think of him as a saint; a person who gifted us with a deeper appreciation of the joy and wonder of God’s work in all creation.  Fortunately for us, Charles Darwin found the courage to will and persevere, whose integrity in speaking the truth of his experience reflected the integrity of God’s truth expressed in all creation.

THOMAS MERTON

Thomas Merton was the 20th Century Trappist Monk who reintroduced Western Christianity to contemplative practices. Merton was baptized an Anglican in the Pyrenees of South France.  Educated in France and in Cambridge England, he didn’t seem drawn to religion in his early life.  At one point in his life, he claimed to be an agnostic and fathered a child out of wedlock. 

It wasn’t until some years later that he met a Hindu monk, Brahmachari, who sparked his interest in religious life, but instead of pointing Thomas to Hinduism, he pointed him back to his own religious roots, Christianity, and told him to start there.  Merton eventually became a Trappist monk at the Abbey of Gethsemane in Indiana. His books on contemplative prayer and his life journey are considered Christian classics.  His groundbreaking work in interfaith dialogue with Buddhists, like Thich Nhat Hanh, helped Christians everywhere better understand our scriptures and traditions through the lens of what others have to offer. 

My reason for briefly sharing their stories is that we don’t know what wonders God will perform through those baptized into Christ or where their journey will lead them and us.  Both Darwin and Merton encountered experiences that drew out a faith that shattered previous held beliefs for them and for us.  Both demonstrated what I would call the integrity of faith by embracing their experiences, learning from them, and sharing the knowledge garnered from them with the world.

BAPTISM

In the ritual of baptism we witness a symbolic reorientation to one’s original state of grace – the death of a prejudicial worldview that only sees sin and a sinner; a presentation of the clean slate that every newborn and every reborn represents.  Baptism is a symbolic reset of creation to the goodness that it is.  This is Christ’s mission in the world; a mission we share.  In that reset, we honor the creative Spirit of God that each of us has been proportioned; the inquiring and discerning heart that in its individuality is uniquely in sync with the mind of Christ and the will of God in ways that stretch the imagination.  

I have come to see baptism as something that should change how we see the person being baptized; a wiping away of our prejudicial biases; to look at the recipient of this ritual sacrament as a grace filled child of God who is set on a journey of inquiry and discernment, no matter what their age or the circumstances they come from.  We need to remember that regardless of where that journey leads them, we have pledged them our support.   In this baptismal prayer, the path to knowing and loving God in the joy and wonder of creation is opened in ways for the baptized that we cannot see or understand at the time.

DISCERNING THE WAY FORWARD

This prayer also reminds me of the journey this congregation is currently on. We are all headed towards something; an ending that is likely a beginning whether we like it or know what that means and nothing brings this to the forefront of a congregation’s awareness than when it loses a pastor and is faced with searching for someone to shepherd its flock.

Now is the time for using our inquiring and discerning hearts. 

Now is the time to find the courage to will and persevere.

Discernment is a unique process that asks us to listen deeply to the heart of this congregation in order to find the mind of Christ in our journey forward.   Anyone who has experienced a discernment process for ministry knows that it is not so much about exercising one’s will as it is about letting go of it and letting God lead the way forward.

Thomas Merton wrote what is probably one of the best personal prayers regarding discerning the way forward which I am paraphrasing for our collective use:

OUR LORD GOD, We have no idea where we are going. We do not see the road ahead of us. We cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do we really know ourselves, and the fact that we think that we are following your will does not mean that we are actually doing so. But we believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And we hope we have that desire in all that we are doing. We hope that we will never do anything apart from that desire. And we know that if we do this you will lead us by the right road though we may know nothing about it. Therefore, will we trust you always though we may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. We will not fear, for you are ever with us, and you will never leave us to face our perils alone.[3]

Amen.




[1] “The Book of Common Prayer,”  The Church Hymnal Corporation, New York, 1979, pg. 308
[2] Richard Hooker in “Laws of Ecclesial Polity.”
[3] Thomas Merton, (paraphrased) see original version From “Through the Year with Thomas Merton”