The Better Part / Advent Day 20

Psalm 131

Lord, I am not proud,
holding my head too high,
reaching beyond my grasp.

No, I am calm and tranquil
like a weaned child
resting in its mother’s arms:
my whole being at rest.

Let Israel rest in the Lord,
now and for ever.

Well, that’s sure not me talking. Here’s where the "beloved" interpretation of the Psalms I talked about a couple days ago, has it right. At best, we want to ask for, or long for, or humbly work toward these qualities. Here’s how Nan Merrill says it:

Help me to calm and quiet my soul,
like a child quieted at its mother’s breast,
like a child that is quieted,
be so my soul.

The weekend before Christmas, I feel like Martha of the Mary-Martha story (Luke 10:38). They are co-hosts of an impromptu reception for Jesus and his entourage. Mary gets all focused on what Jesus is saying in the living room, and Martha out back on the grill is herself steaming. "Tell her to help out," she demands of Jesus. He should know injustice when he sees it, right?

"Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things," he replies. "There is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her."

Not how I would have said it, to be sure. But an important distinction. What do we spend our time on earth doing? Crossing items off our list? Or living out from the center?

How do we find our way back to the center, when we’re in the ice-fog of daily life? Isn’t it by calling out, like a voice in a Psalm, if you believe in being answered. Or by stopping and listening, if you believe that the answering voice comes from within.

My friend Margaret and I were talking over coffee yesterday about "mission." Margaret thought she didn’t have a mission, and I thought we all do, which, after defining terms, we ended up agreeing on. What we do with our hours and days, our to-do lists and our relationships, become our "mission," for better or worse.

What’s nice about religions of the "book," the Bible, is that they have texts to remind you of what you aspired to. You keep coming back to them. What’s not great is when the texts are wielded by someone other than you, someone who is unwise or even cruel. The people who are drawn to authority, and who become "authority," often are people who carry some pain.

Which is where other practices, like sitting and breathing, a la Thich Nhat Hanh, are so helpful. You come back to being "a child quieted at its mother’s breast," because it’s who you want to be for yourself.

It’s also probably who you want to be to others in the world, holding them close, and loving them for who they are, freeing them, challenging them to be fully themselves. No list-keeping required.

Iffy Love / Advent Day 19

I love everybody
especially you. Lyle Lovett

At Thich Nhat Hanh’s Plum Village, the large bell gongs four times an hour, and you stop to love that moment. To breathe into that conversation. To notice the colors, the smells of that specific task. To remember your life, its beginning and its ending, so you can savor this chapter of your life, this paragraph, this phrase in its wondrous, ex-nihilo conception.

I sat up this morning at 6:01 am. We’re still sleeping upstairs in the living room, though the ventilation unit is installed, and the scant bedroom radon should be way scant now. In the dark, I sensed Marin semi-horizontal on the loveseat, trying to find some kind of comfort, being the living construction site for a fast-growing little baby. Matteo was one foam mattress over, in his butt-up face-down bug position. I thought, now would be the time to meditate. To actively love the moment, to breathe, to notice colors and smells, to remember beginnings and endings.

I’m writing instead, drinking coffee, pushing my way into a crowded subway car of my life, checking my transit map to try to figure out which line I transfer to in how many stops, and wondering if it will be obvious when I get there how I get a transfer, and will I arrive on time, and does it matter anyway. . .

There’s always a couple of weeks leading up to Christmas when I am thinking, I love everybody, especially you. I used to translate that into getting Alaska gifts for everyone in my immediate family and something thoughtful for everyone else, the people I love as friends and those who has been, as Esther used to say, over and again, "good to me." "You’re good to me, Cheffrey." Then there were the sermons to write and the long lines at the post office and suddenly, there’s Christmas in the rear view mirror.

So, I’ve been thinking it over again, how can I better love the people I love, to let their goodness permeate my heart, and to get past my misguided impulse to think myself more capable than I am, resulting in no love just blame: harping at my missed deadlines, unanswered letters, draft Christmas letter, my short temper. My best of intentions swirl into the stratosphere while actual flesh-and-blood relationships sail effortlessly apart like stars in an expanding universe.

"Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends." Now there’s a thought on how to love the people you love. Open a new entrance into your safe, secure life where others can find shelter, nurture, sustenance. Lay down the welcome mat, if not the whole shebang. Martrydom (dying for the revolution), as they say, is the easy part.

Note: I always help Jesus along here in John chapter 15, by de-linking this stunning and brilliant thought from the next: "Ye are my friends, if ye do whatsoever I command you."

"If?" Can there be "ifs" in this realm?

Isn’t the power and glory found in the "unconditionality" of friendship, family? I suspect an anthropologist could make a strong argument that unconditionality is what what makes us fully human. Relationships work, they are miraculous and transforming when they are unconditional. Simply stated: we love because it’s in our nature to love, not because someone makes themselves easy to love. The harder to love, the more remarkable loving becomes.

Writing the gospel of John, pre-dawn mornings before going to work in first century Asia Minor, the authors lost their focus. From memories of what Jesus actually said, they fleshed out what stands as the most anti-semetic text of the Bible. They inserted a lot of huge, historically supremely tragic "ifs."

Advent, a time for weeding the ifs from the garden of our loves.

Open Door Closed Door / Advent Day 4

Which doors to our heart do we keep open. Which are closed, nailed shut? Which doors do we sit beside, carefully monitoring what comes in? Which are like the gates of the Buddhist monasteries before which pilgrims sit meditating for days before the enclosure is opened from within, and the pilgrim is invited to join the seeking, meal-sharing community?

A friend Marilyn told the story at last week’s Chalice Circle at UUFF about being at Plum Village, the Buddhist visionary Thich Nhat Hanh’s community in France. Every 15 minutes throughout the day, a bell would sound which could be heard everywhere, and each person would stop what they were doing, stop their conversation, their reading, their writing, take note of their breath: "I breathe in, my body relaxes; I breathe out, I smile."

I decided I was going to cut back on the crap that I have delivered to my "in box" over the internet. But as I peeled through it before breakfast this morning, it wasn’t overwhelming. Don’t we owe it to ourselves and our children to know, for example, that George Bush remains this morning undeterred in his threats and blame of Iran, despite the rebellion in his Intelligence services, which revealed yesterday that Iran has been off the "bomb" for at least the past four years. This in the face of Bush’s World War 3 quip from six weeks ago, against those who would not join the US in leveling sanctions against the Tehran regime. You would have thought he’d do damage control and let the focus shift to something the GOP is better at growling over, such as undocumented people (now even the left is calling these unfortunates "illegal aliens"). Bush/Cheny may yet get to start a third Mideast war before it’s all over.

Is this worth reading about? Does this help us live, and love, and care for one another?

I think so. If only to set out what a bottom line of "adequacy" in the craft of reporting. Last week, listening to the KCRW "Left, Right and Center" podcast, I heard Bob Sheer’s (of Truthdig.com) insightful critique of the press corps which trudges after the candidates, drinking in small town bars at night, sharing gossip, offering up for their editors Iowan nuance and insider insights, but failing utterly to look at the large issues of history, how and where common people live their lives, what is happening to the world on our watch. Immediately after his brilliant rant, moderator Matt Miller asked Tony Blankly of the Washington Times about a gathering of press corps and Mike Huckabee inside the beltway over a lunch, and three minutes of Iowan nuance and insider insights resulted, directly in the face of Sheer’s critique. Sheer jumped back in and nailed them.

He’s exactly right! It’s so hard to stay focused on the substance of our political life together. What about corporations and climate change? What about changing the American lifestyle so that we can live beyond peak oil? What about creating a sense of community together, rather than exploiting differences in opinion on Abortion or Muslims or Homosexuality to gin up fears and angers on deadline for election day? Instead of having a conversation among ourselves which matters, we allow the politicos to drink and gossip together for our delight or disgust, and let the war continue, let the economy feed the rich, and let the oil companies destroy the future of our planet.

And the religious or spiritually attuned, feel overwhelmed by the sadness of all this. They turn to prayer, meditation, and other practices in order to recover a sense of self, or God’s presence above the fray.

But aren’t we making the same mistake that all escapists make – those who do TV or Paris Hilton or alcohol or false religion or sports to feel better – about the sacred. The sacred isn’t an idea, it’s a way of living together in the real biological community called Earth. Part of it is the wonderfully resiliant political realm created for us by the Jeffersons and Madisons, salvaged at great human expense from the Hitlers and Pol Pots. And now from the Blackwaters and the Exxons. Aren’t we allowing the slackers in the media to annoy us to the point that we stop paying attention. And when we stop being able to "stay awake" Haliburton steals your wallet, and your keys, and locks you out of your own home.

"Keep alert," Jesus says in one of his famous parables, (Luke 12: 36): "Know this: if the owner of the house had known at what hour the thief was coming, he would not have let his house be broken into." Maybe some would say that our preparation for the Winter Solstice, the Christians season of Advent, isn’t a time to have hands sullied with the matters of the world. I’d say, like anyone waiting for a rare wild animal to come down to drink from the stream at dusk: "Quiet. Watch."