the divine discontent

This Sunday is Martin Luther King, Jr. Sunday, and, as I prepare for it, I’m remembering the path that Dr. King was following toward the end of his life.  While he still speaks to me in terms of the ongoing racism and classism in America, I am challenged more and more by his antiwar activism and his absolute commitment to the poor in this country and around the world.  I’ve been poring over pages of his sermons and addresses, and the phrase I can’t shake is, “the divine discontent.”  He used those words to express that his critique of the status quo was essentially a religious one.  The spirit that was stirring in him, urging him to speak and to act, was, in King’s view, this divine discontent.

As we move toward Sunday, I invite you to revisit Dr. King’s writings and see what they stir in you.  There are a number of good online resources, which I will list at the end of this post (cut and paste them into your browser to visit the sites).  I also invite you to share your thoughts on Martin Luther King on this blog.  What does his voice evoke in you?  How does the life he lived speak to or challenge you?  In his own words, “Where do we go from here?”

J

The King Center – http://www.thekingcenter.org/

Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University – http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/

Morehouse College Martin Luther King, Jr. Collection – http://www.morehouse.edu/kingcollection/index.html

welcoming a new year

I began this week on vacation with Sara and Ian.  Up early Sunday morning, we stood on the balcony of our hotel room and watched the sun rise over the Gulf of Mexico.  We listened to the wind and waves, watched the light change the color of sea and sky, and smiled at the wonder of a new day.

Near week’s end, I am now contemplating the passing of the calendar year.  Tonight we will toast what has been and hope for what will be, putting our heads to pillows before rising to a new day that happens also to be a new year.  I have gone round and round on resolutions in my life, some years making them before losing my resolve, and, at other times, deciding Jan. 1 was arbitrary and its traditions a bit trite.  Yet this year I find myself looking ahead in a different way.  I welcome the chance to ritualize my best intentions — for myself and my family, for our church and our city, for the breathtaking and fragile world that we share.

At least a part of my commitment in the year to come is what Thich Nhat Hanh calls a personal peace treaty.  In his book, Creating True Peace: Ending Violence in Yourself, Your Family, Your Community, and the World, he writes, “To make a personal peace treaty we can write:  ’Dear Self, I promise to practice and live my daily life in a way that will not touch or water the seed of violence within me.’  We are determined in every moment to protect ourselves from negative thinking and to nourish loving-kindness within us.  We can also share this commitment with our beloved ones.”  Thay goes on to say that, following such a personal peace treaty, we give ourselves to the work of understanding and compassion among all of the people with whom we regularly interact.

In seeking to avoid “negative thinking” this year, I have no intention of putting aside critical thought or analysis.  Rather, I hope to add to the critical element a deeper kind of compassion.  We, at Covenant, will continue to proclaim a liberal gospel of inclusion for all people.  We will preach and act on matters of social justice.  We will care for each other and our beloved Earth.  But, in 2010, perhaps we will find new ways of doing these things gently, with love for each other and joy in the work.  As with the close of every year, I find myself grateful to be in a vibrant and creative community of faith that encourages everyone, even the minister, to learn and grow, making new commitments and finding fresh resolve along the way.

Sometimes a sunrise is reminder enough.  This is a new day.  This is a new year.  Let us each find our ways to welcome them.

J

(If you have thoughts or resolutions to share, I invite you to post them.  See you in 2010, dear ones.)

watching and waiting

Well, the season is upon us.  Advent has blown in on the back of a cold front, and, all of a sudden, we’ve gone from a temperate Gulf Coast fall to the wintry weeks before Christmas.  Overcoats and sweaters have come out of their hiding places, kettles of water have been set to boil for tea, and, at least in our house, Ella Fitzgerald’s Christmas album is in full swing.  We begin our days in robes and sock feet singing, “Let it Snow! Let it Snow! Let it Snow!” with the First Lady of Song herself.

Our religious tradition invites us to spend these weeks watching and waiting for the birth of the sacred among us, which we will ultimately celebrate in our annual Christmas Eve candlelight service of lessons and carols.  In the meantime, however, our seasonal treats and traditions cast these weeks in a gentle hue.  I write to ask what traditions you and your family hold that mark these days as different and help you to make a place for the Christmas that is coming.  What did you do growing up?  What do you do now?

J

our children, ourselves

The week before last I invoked Maurice Sendak’s children’s classic, Where the Wild Things Are.  I’ve been thinking about the stories we tell ourselves and our children ever since.  This is, in part, because I’m always thinking about the ways we choose to tell stories.  And it is, in part, because I’ve been reading Seth Lerer’s delightful overview, Children’s Literature: A Reader’s History from Aesop to Harry Potter.

An observation from Lerer’s Introduction haunts me:  ”Some readers have found children’s literature to be a rack of hats: didactic, useful books that keep us warm or guard us against weather.  I find children’s literature to be a world of snakes: seductive things that live in undergrowths and that may take us whole.” (p. 3)

Leaving aside for a moment the obvious serpent from our sacred stories, I am drawn to Lerer’s contention that the stories we tell our children (and the children still within ourselves) touch on the places that scare us, including the seductive, dangerous, and unknown.  I mentioned in last year’s Earth Sunday sermon my own anxious response to The Lorax by Dr. Seuss, a formative text for my early childhood as I began to worry about the fate of the Earth.  (Any wonder, then, that my theology is so deeply ecological?)  This year I shared about the fright found within Sendak’s tale of adventure that sails on an undercurrent of questions about getting angry and running away.  Perhaps next year I’ll finally get around to Margret and H. A. Rey’s irreplaceable Curious George and all that I learned from that book about following our curiosity and the risks that ensue.  Are these tales racks of hats or worlds of snakes?  In my own case, perhaps the answer is a bit of both.  The purpose of the blog, however, is to ask you:

What children’s stories shaped you?  What stories do you share with the children around you (or with that child still within)?  This author, only thinly disguised as a grown-up would love to know.

J

songs to sing along the way

This week I took a vacation day as old seminary friends came to town for the U2 concert.  We had a lovely time catching up on our life and work, sharing about our families and children, and, following our custom, discussing what we have been listening to of late.  For many of us, music has marked the seasons of our lives, creating soundtracks as individual as each one of us.  I realized, listening to U2 play much of their back catalogue over the course of a two-hour concert, how I relate so many of the songs to very different periods in my life – from the days I was an identity-seeking Middle School kid listening to The Unforgettable Fire to the months I was a college senior grieving for my father while listening to the dark-edged Achtung Baby to the days spent analyzing the postmodern spirituality of Pop for a seminary professor, who then encouraged me to present my ideas to the entire class.

U2 is just one of the bands that has played on my personal soundtrack.  Other significant influences have included the brilliant New Zealand songsmith, Neil Finn, the Hawai’an ukulele player, Iz Kamakawiwo’ole, or the melancholy Oxfordshire heroes, Radiohead.  I could go on and on, but I think I’d rather just ask:

What records have played during the most significant scenes in your story?  What albums do you return to again and again?  What songs do you sing as you pad down the path that we’re all on, searching for something that we can call sacred together?

J

planting the seeds of peace

This Sunday we’ll celebrate Peace Sunday in conjunction with the United Nations’ International Day of Peace.  There are any number of ways to approach such a broad theme – peace – and ask its questions about where peace is to be found or how it is to be made within ourselves, our community, and our world.  This week, however, I’d like to start small.  I’d like to take the idea of peace in bite-sized increments, considering a spirituality that is local, embodied, and sensual.  As many of you know, over the past several years, the garden, the farmers’ market, and the dinner plate have been my teachers.  This week I would like to consider together the relationships between our bodies and our Earth and what this give and take has to do with peace.

J

the public option and the preferential option

This week we’ll consider the health care debate from the perspective of our faith.  Like many of you, I have been alarmed by the shrill voices we have heard in town hall meetings and on Op-Ed pages.  Many of these voices worry about the cost of care, which seems deeply relevant to the debate, but others simply seem to trade in fear and anxiety, hinting at the idea of health care rationing and Americans going without.  The truth is, of course, that rationing is already here and millions of Americans go without every day.  According to the National Council of Churches, nearly 50 million of us currently have no health insurance coverage whatsoever, while tens of millions more either suffer from inadequate coverage or find themselves one or two paychecks away from being bankrupted by a serious illness.  One of the voices that I feel is missing from the debate is the religious voice of compassion, inclusion, and, dare we say, liberation from this dehumanizing status quo.

With this in mind, we’ll consider health care reform on Sunday.  Among the things I am reading or rereading this week are James Cone’s book of liberation theology, God of the Oppressed, Harvey Cox’s essay, “Mammon and the Culture of the Market: A Socio-Theological Critique,” Arnold Relman’s A Second Opinion: Rescuing America’s Health Care, T. R. Reid’s The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care, and Maggie Mahar’s Money-Driven Medicince: The Real Reason Health Care Costs So Much.  (The last two volumes listed are detailed in recent episodes of the PBS television programs Frontline and Bill Moyers Journal, respectively.)  Each of these sources influences the way I read our lectionary text, or vice versa, as we hear some old words from the Book of James that invite us to see through our privileged systems to glimpse the poor and the outcast, suggesting that faith is meaningless if it doesn’t act to meet the physical needs of our sisters and brothers (Jas. 2.1-10, 14-17).

Liberation theology affirms that, while all people possess equal dignity and value, we must take the side of those who are poor, marginalized, and struggling for the basics of life and health.  This side-taking is often referred to as the “preferential option” for the poor.  I wonder what it would mean if more people of faith began to raise the voice of liberation theology in the current debate.  I wonder how it would change the conversation to move from the fear of what some of us might lose to the hope of what we all might gain.  I wonder if each of us might find time to call, write, or visit our representatives during this critical moment.  The reform on the table is, in my view, hardly the stuff of systemic liberation.  But the voices of liberation might help us see where we are more clearly and take one more step on the road to a better life for all.

What do you think?

J

a hat full of peas and a toy prius

I’m reflecting this morning on the community garden where many of us have worked this year.  It seems that it was about February when Herb Rothschild, working with Margie, Sara, and a number of other people, introduced us to the garden on Wheeler Avenue.  Our family has come to love visiting the garden and working there.  Through it, we feel more connected to our sister church, Augustana Lutheran, our neighbors who join us to weed and water, and our natural Gulf Coast environment.

The photo was taken on one of our morning visits to the garden.  It pictures a straw hat full of purple hull peas and a toy Prius that Ian brought and set down before heading out to explore.  I am grateful that our family has this connection to the earth; it brings me joy to see Ian eat a carrot just plucked from the ground and rinsed with a hose, Sara tending grapes or carrying compost, or my own shadow supplemented by a long rake handle or the brim of a straw hat.

There are more gardening work days to come, and, with the coming of fall, it will only get more fun.  I invite you to share your own garden experiences here.  Better yet, check your newsletter and meet us some Saturday at the garden.

J

meditation is old and honorable

In her poem, “What I Have Learned So Far,” Mary Oliver writes, “Meditation is old and honorable, so why should I not sit, every morning of my life, on the hillside, looking into the shining world?”

This week we’ll consider a number of contemplative themes, including silence, meditation, and mindfulness.  These are themes that we often associate with Asian traditions, notably Hinduism and Buddhism, but they are also present in the history of Christian contemplative practices.  There is also growing evidence that meditative practices lend themselves to our physical and emotional health.  Of late, I’ve been reading Alan Wallace’s Mind in the Balance: Meditation in Science, Buddhism, and Christianity, and this has influenced my thinking.  More importantly, however, is the role of an old seminary professor and genuine mystic, Glenn Hinson.  He never began a class without five full minutes of Quakerlike silence.  I find that my own need for silence runs deep.

As we reflect on reflection, I invite you to post thoughts on your own experiences with silence, meditation, mindfulness, or other contemplative themes.  The photo atop this post was taken at a Zen farm in Northern California where I once spent a number of days in silence.  I look forward to hearing about your own experiences.

J

spirituality and cinema

This week’s meditation will draw on a scene from a film that has haunted me ever since I watched it some years ago.  The film was something of a comedic philosophical romp, playing our deepest existential questions for laughs.  The scene I am reminded of was shot and acted so drily that its best line caught me off guard and doubled me over with laughter.  The line made mention of Jesus and mocked our expectations of him.  I’ll give more detail on Sunday, but, until then, if you’d like to take a guess at the film go ahead.

My question for the blog involves favorite films.  What scenes have haunted you?  What directors have moved you?  What actors have challenged you?  On your own search for meaning, what movie houses have you ducked into and what pictures have you found most memorable?

J