It's 4a.m. and I don't know whether it's the rain or my back that's awakened me. The pain is smaller than a dime, just left of center. It's smaller than a dime, but so is the tip of an icepick. It's reminding me that I'm a body.
I don't know how many dime sized areas there are on my surface. A lot, even though I'm not a very big guy. Perhaps I ought to be thinking about all those comfortable spots. A better person would be. A better person would think themselves in the direction of everything well and uninjured.
But when I'm awake in the middle of the night and mindful of being a body I read the undertaker: "We are bodies in motion and at rest--there in George's master bedroom, in the gray light of the midmorning, and hour or so after his daughter found him because he didn't answer when she called this morning, and he always answers, and she always calls, so she got in the car and drove over and found him exactly as we find him here: breathless, unfettered, perfectly still, manifestly indifferent to all this hubbub."
I don't think I'm a paranoid hypochondriac. Nothing in me is worried that my little portion of all the world's pain this morning is the beginnings of swine flu, or some other dreaded force soon to lay me out like poor George. No, I don't read the undertaker because any little ache or pain brings thoughts of doom and demise.
I read the undertaker because there's no mystery greater, or no access to great mystery more reliable than the bodily ones. And sometimes it takes nothing more than a dime sized discomfort to remind me that I'm a body, and, as such, a mystery.
On Sunday Jesus ate a fish, pointed to his hands and feet, insisted that the mystery before the gaping disciples was bodily. Not ghostly. It was a body in motion that should have been at rest.
Now there is plenty in these stories to suggest that the body of Jesus that stopped breathing at about 3pm one Friday, did not simply start breathing again early Sunday morning. His friends don't recognize him. I considered this in my sermon on Sunday.
But one thing these stories suggest is that a body is enough. The mystery of God, the mystery of meaning, of why and whether we matter comes to us most powerfully not in invisible forces and spiritual powers, but in bodies. In bodies at rest, like George's, where the mystery of being is unbearably present to us, and bodies in motion, even like mine, shifting away from the dime sized annoyance in my back, just to the left, screaming to me that I'm a body. Awake. Aware. And a body just the same.
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
Church
Wendell Berry noted that once upon a time the eyes were considered the window to the soul. Now, making eye contact with a stranger on an American city sidewalk can be construed as a form of aggression.
What does this say about our souls?
The problem here, I suggest, is not urbanization, but privatization. The privatization I'm talking about isn't about the ownership of banks or health care or security forces. The problem may be the privatization of our spiritual lives.
The house where my aunt and uncle lived in Siloam Springs was on an ordinary street, lined with ranch style houses. They were built during an era in which our dwellings were gradually evolving into garages with attached houses.
Front porches were disappearing or being reduced to stoops just large enough for a couple of visitors to stand uncomfortably within, awaiting their welcome into the house. But this neighbor pushed back against the architecture of the day, not by remodeling his house, but by sitting on a lawn chair in his open garage.
It was a defiant act, really, to read his paper and drink a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon there. It at least defied what his home and his neighborhood were trying to have him do. Everything was arranged with its back to the street, the life of the household directed to the backyard, privacy-fenced and accessible only to the invited.
But since front porch culture was gone, he also seemed a little pathetic, out of place, making motions that make no sense in his present environment, like the sad pumping of the useless gills of a landed fish.
The image of the modern spiritual pilgrim is often that of the lone explorer, going it alone deep into the mystery of life. But aren't there too many of us who have struck out on our own, only to find ourselves on an aluminum chair in the garage, looking for the life on the sidewalk that is no longer?
Privatizing the spiritual life comes at a cost. Because if the eyes really are the window to the soul, I can't gain access to my own soul without you. I can't see my own eyes.
So maybe the most faithful concept of church is about making an honest-to-God front porch for the spiritual life. A place where we plop ourselves precisely because there's no telling whom we might encounter there. Or because we do know whom we're going to encounter there: a smattering of those wonderful, annoying, hypocritical, brilliant, loving, petty creatures we call human.
Maybe the soul is better accessed in all those exchanges between selves rather than within the self in isolation. Maybe going to church is simply meant to be deciding to sit for a spell on the porch once a week and see who passes by.
For some of us, somehow, it works. "And that is why," Kathleen Norris says, "when the battles rage, people hold on. They find a sufficient unity, and a rubbed raw but sufficient love, and even the presence of God."
Maybe we don't have to forgo front porch spirituality, even in the day of decks and privacy fences. But it won't help to sit alone in the garage and pretend. We have to be porch sitters, or sidewalk walkers for each other.
What does this say about our souls?
The problem here, I suggest, is not urbanization, but privatization. The privatization I'm talking about isn't about the ownership of banks or health care or security forces. The problem may be the privatization of our spiritual lives.
The house where my aunt and uncle lived in Siloam Springs was on an ordinary street, lined with ranch style houses. They were built during an era in which our dwellings were gradually evolving into garages with attached houses.
Front porches were disappearing or being reduced to stoops just large enough for a couple of visitors to stand uncomfortably within, awaiting their welcome into the house. But this neighbor pushed back against the architecture of the day, not by remodeling his house, but by sitting on a lawn chair in his open garage.
It was a defiant act, really, to read his paper and drink a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon there. It at least defied what his home and his neighborhood were trying to have him do. Everything was arranged with its back to the street, the life of the household directed to the backyard, privacy-fenced and accessible only to the invited.
But since front porch culture was gone, he also seemed a little pathetic, out of place, making motions that make no sense in his present environment, like the sad pumping of the useless gills of a landed fish.
The image of the modern spiritual pilgrim is often that of the lone explorer, going it alone deep into the mystery of life. But aren't there too many of us who have struck out on our own, only to find ourselves on an aluminum chair in the garage, looking for the life on the sidewalk that is no longer?
Privatizing the spiritual life comes at a cost. Because if the eyes really are the window to the soul, I can't gain access to my own soul without you. I can't see my own eyes.
So maybe the most faithful concept of church is about making an honest-to-God front porch for the spiritual life. A place where we plop ourselves precisely because there's no telling whom we might encounter there. Or because we do know whom we're going to encounter there: a smattering of those wonderful, annoying, hypocritical, brilliant, loving, petty creatures we call human.
Maybe the soul is better accessed in all those exchanges between selves rather than within the self in isolation. Maybe going to church is simply meant to be deciding to sit for a spell on the porch once a week and see who passes by.
For some of us, somehow, it works. "And that is why," Kathleen Norris says, "when the battles rage, people hold on. They find a sufficient unity, and a rubbed raw but sufficient love, and even the presence of God."
Maybe we don't have to forgo front porch spirituality, even in the day of decks and privacy fences. But it won't help to sit alone in the garage and pretend. We have to be porch sitters, or sidewalk walkers for each other.
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