Perfection

Gospel reading: Luke 16.1-13
(Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)

Have you ever seen one of Sam Maloof's chairs? Let me take a stab at a new trick. There's one on the right side of the page. They're compelling, I think. The bend of the slats and the curve of the crest rail and the arms that reach out just so. They're compelling, but not perfect.

At least they're not perfect as we usually conceive perfection. This isn't my opinion, by the way. It's their maker's.

Sam Maloof has practiced and taught woodworking for years in Alta Loma, California. And in an interview he once described the difficult task of getting his students away from the age old association of perfection with precision. He said that if one was having trouble sharpening a chisel, she need not go out and buy a contraption to hold the tool at precisely the proper angle to the stone. The source of the trouble is more likely an unnatural motion in the hands of the woodworker. Likewise he would preach that woodworkers have no need for micrometers, as though they were milling surgical instruments from stainless steel. No, lumber needs a different kind of attention. It changes with humidity. It's grain must be honored. The wrong notion of perfection means we never get a Sam Maloof chair.

Kathleen Norris suggests that Christians have been distracted and maybe even hamstrung by wrongheaded notions of perfection. We too confuse it with precision and freedom from flaws. But Norris tells us that the word often translated 'perfection' from the New Testament is closer to completion or maturity. It carries the sense that a thing or a person has become what it was intended to be.

This is good news. Norris offers Martha Stewart as "the high priestess of Perfection: one dare not let the mask slip, even in one's home, where all is perfect right down to the last hand-stenciled napkin ring." Most of us can't sustain that kind of perfection with regard to homemaking, much less with regard to our moral and religious lives. But progressing toward a more authentic self, toward the person I was made by God to be, that sounds like good work to take up rather than the burdensome work of keeping up - with God's impossible expectations or the Jones's.

Our gospel reading on Sunday was that unsettling parable of the dishonest manager. Read it and try to make sense of it while holding on to our default definitions of perfection. A rich man fires his manager for squandering his property. Then the manager goes out to his former employer's debtors and settles accounts for less than full value. And the rich man approves. The manager apparently made the best out of this bad situation. The parable implies that this must have been the real job he was hired to do.

Jesus' interpretation of the story is just as unexpected. He tells us to make friends for ourselves by means of dishonest wealth. He ultimately tells us we can't serve God and mammon, but we apparently can't live free of contact with mammon either. Perfection isn't accomplished by a kind of quarantine from dishonest wealth. It has something to do with serving God in spite of the dishonest wealth we encounter which may be kind of like that manager's making the best of a bad situation.

On this 50th anniversary of the witness of the Little Rock Nine a reevaluation of our notions of perfection seems relevant. A few brave students changed our world. But our world isn't perfect. Race relation troubles are hardly a thing of the past. But sometimes the shrillest voices seem to describe some other world. One voice says, "Everything's fine now. There are laws on the books that legislate perfection. Access is no longer denied." Another voice says, "Nothing's changed. And we won't say things are better until... [Insert your own vision of utopia. It usually entails a world in which everybody has migrated freely to your point of view.]"

In the world we actually inhabit, isn't the real question How can our culture, how can our churches, how can our schools participate in the maturing of people into the fullness God intended for each of them? This is a messier task than pressing each person into a single mold labeled 'perfect'. Those who struggle with moral and religious OCD should beware.

But Jesus seems to be telling us that our call is to live faithfully in this imperfect world. Maybe even the pursuit of justice needs to be like building a Sam Maloof chair. The knots and curls in the grain must be incorporated into whatever beauty we will manage. The beautiful things of this world don't pretend to be made of materials from another. They're perfect. They have become fully themselves. Blemished and beautiful.

Exorcism

Gospel reading: Luke 15.1-10
(Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)

"The need for everyday, ordinary exorcism is not much acknowledged." (from Amazing Grace)

Sentences like this one have a lot to do with why I find Kathleen Norris's book engaging. My hunch is you've never heard that sentiment expressed. And if you have it wasn't in such a nonchalant, understated way. Exorcism and demonic possession are the domain of raving street corner preachers or the inhabitants of mental institutions. One can define what constitutes 'polite' company very, very broadly and still manage to exclude exorcists.

But the reason for our discomfort may in fact point us to a distortion in the way these words have been appropriated. And correcting that distortion might just show us why talking of demons and exorcisms might still be useful.

My discomfort, and yours too perhaps, stems from the notion that a demon is a being out there. Even if I come to believe that I am 'possessed' by one, it is still something or someone alien to myself. But scholar Peter Brown wrote that for the early monastics the demonic was "an extension of the self." It may well be helpful to describe a part of ourself even as a dragon, but there's a sense in which if I never acknowledge how much of my own history, my own predispositions, my own wounds make up my demons exorcism may not quite be possible.

Discussion of demons opens up a related discussion about language and its impoverishment in a scientific age. In reality, language has expanded in mind boggling ways as scientific knowledge has. But somewhere along the way as we kept naming our world from the tiniest scraps of matter to expanses that must be described in terms of the speed of light, somewhere along the way we forgot that language doesn't just name things. It evokes things too.

If a demon is one more 'thing' alongside frogs and fluoride and flap jackets an exorcism is a kind of surgical procedure that has little to do with me. Believing in such demons may not sound terribly scientific, but it's our instinctive preference for assigning things to clear categories that pushes us into a false choice. Do you believe in demons or not? was a less interesting and less helpful question to those ancient monks than What are your demons? The first question presses us to choose between competing facts. The second opens our imagination and our language enough to start probing the mystery of our selves.

Kathleen Norris attempted to exorcise a demon from her adolescence. She was half apologetic about the relative insignificance of common middle school cruelty compared with some of the world's suffering. But what she realized was that a bitterness took up residence within her as an 11-year-old, and it stayed for years. Had she pretended not to need exorcism simply because the demons of other people seemed greater than hers, she would still be possessed, so to speak.

Lewis Hyde once wrote that we forgive when we lose attachment to our wounds. And something in Norris's story struck me as a struggle to detach from a wound. Exorcism must bear some relationship to forgiveness if only that they are both ways of gaining just enough freedom from our past to move forward.

The gospel we read yesterday suggested that there is joy in heaven when such shifts occur in our lives. When we repent, when we turn around, there is joy. And when I think of exorcism as a movement in the direction of God's joy or a participation in God's joy it becomes an enticing possibility. Rightly imagined, everyday, ordinary exorcism might just be a life-giving practice as we slowly come to take more interest in God's joy than our tired old wounds.

Conversion: The Family Story

Gospel reading: Luke 14.25-33
(Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)

"The word 'conversion' comes from the Latin for 'to turn around.' Thus it denotes a change of perspective but not of essence: a change of view but not of location." (from Amazing Grace by Kathleen Norris)

I've been reading a book called Imagining Redemption by David Kelsey. And in it he takes issue with the notion (or cliche really) of a 'point of view.' He writes, "No human person can live on a point. No one can really occupy some one point for viewing the world...The phrase 'point of view'...is abstracted from the messiness, contingency, and oddity of everyday life."

That's a lot of quoting in the first two paragraphs in a blog. Seems like cheating. But the two quotes are helpful to me as I imagine conversion. And what I come away with is even if or when or while I'm converted, I'm still here. More to the point, I'm still here with all of you fools among the "messiness, contingency, and oddity of everyday life."

I think this sentiment might have been part of what led Kathleen Norris to call conversion a family story. Usually we think of conversion in individual terms. And we're inclined to think of it as a delivery from the world's troubles. Maybe you've known a convert who suddenly had no use for you and your unenlightened view of the world.

But that's not how it goes in the Bible at least. Even that quintessential convert, St. Paul, would tell us about his struggles. He does the things he doesn't want to do, and doesn't do the things he wants to do. And this is life after the blinding flash on the Damascus road.

And so it is with us. But the difference may be a newfound faith that the entanglements of life are not something to be delivered from. Conversion renames them incarnation and suspects that if God works at all, God works in our life together.

Calling conversion a family affair seems to defy what we read from the gospel of Luke on Sunday. Jesus said that his disciples had to hate mother and father, brother and sister, even life itself to be his disciple. We have to be ready to walk away from everything. But what he asks is that we follow. And the rest of the New Testament seems to be telling us that if we follow he will lead us right back into relationship with the same old people of the world. In fact he says things like the law comes down to loving God and loving neighbor, and he even suggests that there might me less difference between the two kinds of loving than we think.

Perhaps the call to conversion, drastic as it can be, is good news. It's bad news if we are converted into someone who loses their love for and connection with this world. But that's not conversion at all. When we think we inhabit a different plane of existence from the rest of the world, we think there's been a change of location, not perspective. Life-giving conversion "...is seeing ourselves, and the ordinary people in our families, our classrooms, and on the job, in a new light. Can it be that these very people-even the difficult, unbearable ones-are the ones God has given us, so that together we might find salvation?" When we believe that they can, we're being converted.

Detachment

Gospel reading: Luke 14.1,7-14
(Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)

I knew a boy once - I'll call him Alan (his name has been changed to protect his innocence) - who said, "Mom, I wish I was a girl. Because then I might not like weapons so much."

Now I'm steering clear of debates over gender stereotypes, nurture vs. nature, or the pros and cons of the total disarmament of children (the banishing of all guns from squirt to BB). What that five-year-old boy was really expressing was a desire for detachment, and there's not much difference between the longing behind his words and those of a sixth century monk named Dorotheus of Gaza. He described detachment as "being free from [wanting] certain things to happen," and remaining so trusting of God that "what is happening will be the thing you want, and you will be at peace with all." (quoted in Amazing Grace, p. 32)

Christianity has a long and varied past with regards to its teaching about wants. Fringe sects like the Shakers distrusted desire so much that they forbade sexual intercourse. This placed rather too much burden on the evangelism committee, and they've all but died out. But detachment is not really about avoidance of desire itself. It's about a proper distance from a desire. It's about finding life giving ways of wanting.

If peace has something to do with an alignment between "what is happening" and "the thing you want" then it seems there are two strategies we might employ. We can work on our wants. Or we can work on the rest of the universe. If you have one marginally significant relationship in your life, you know well enough how difficult a task it is to bring a single human will into alignment with your set of priorities, preferences, and pet peeves. Multiply that will by several billion, add in the rest of the animal kingdom (the pets and the pests), and as you can see, the project gets rather unwieldy long before we other relevant concerns...like weather, for instance.

As impossible as attending to my wants can seem, the alternative is only more hopeless.

On Sunday we read one of Jesus' wedding banquet parables. In it he warned about seating ourselves at the prestigious end of the table, because we may be asked to make way for someone more important. Sitting in the lowest place is parablese for humility. But I wonder if Jesus' story is helpfully considered as a teaching about wants. The further up the table we seat ourselves the more hardened our wants have become.

So maybe taking that lower seat is really about detachment. Maybe it's really about a distance from our wants that becomes an openness to the future. The good news in this is that it's always better to be open to the blessing that actually comes our way rather than obsessed about the blessing we think we need or deserve. The universe is terribly uncooperative, and the chances are good that the seat we want most is already taken.

Kathleen Norris has a very straightforward strategy for detachment. She prays the psalms. In them we find the most shocking an irreligious wants spoken right out loud to God. In them we find the most elegant thanksgivings for the unexpected blessings and moments of grace we are given. Maybe we 'want' better by speaking the truth to God, and listening to what we say. And maybe over time we find ourselves a little detached, freed from what might be in order to enjoy what is.

Alan's parent had the wits not to recommend a sex change operation as a solution to his dilemma. But he spoke the truth about his wants, and maybe it was a form of prayer even though he hadn't addressed his thoughts to God directly. I'd like to think the wants didn't go away, but loosened their grip a little.

I guess Alan came through it alright. He didn't head to the hills to join a militia, but he didn't lose a child's large imagination that is so powerfully in touch with the risk and adventure inherent to life in this world. The best stories tell us of such risk. And the best stories tell us we might just need a few weapons for such an adventure. Maybe not swords and revolvers so much as a little detachment and a practice of prayer. With these we might just find our seat at the table is better than we could have imagined.