Medieval

Gospel Reading: Matthew 13.31, 44-52
(Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)

Wendell Berry imagines an exchange between the prophet Isaiah and entomologist E.O. Wilson. Wilson had written dismissively about our sentimental affection for ancient people with outdated ideas. He wondered how useful a person who didn't know about the electromagnetic spectrum would be to us modern people.

Berry's vignette goes like this:

Isaiah (finger in the air and somewhat oblivious of the historical superiority of the modern audience): The voice said, Cry. And he said, What shall I cry? All flesh is grass, and all the goodliness thereof is as of the flower of the field.

Edward O. Wilson (somewhat impressed, but nevertheless determined to do his bit for “evolutionary progress”): But . . . but, sir! Are you aware of the existence of the electromagnetic spectrum?

CURTAIN

I love that little play. Religious people have wasted plenty of breath resisting any science that challenges the literal sense of the Bible. But a few anti-religious people have returned the disfavor and denied the possibility of ancient wisdom, given all the obviously wrong information people once carried. Wrong information about things like our solar system, biology, and the infield fly rule. OK, even lots of modern folks don't understand the infield fly rule. But you get my point.

It's radical to think that someone of another century--particularly one from medieval times, the so called 'dark ages'--might see things that we don't precisely because of their limited world view. What difference does it really make that my information is accurate about which celestial body orbits another if I've lost the capacity to wonder about them?

I'll forge into new blog territory in terms of imposed self disclosure (isn't that what blogs are?) and include a poem I wrote 12 years ago.

Distraction

Alden is fixed on a knot in the floor:
Small discoveries lead ruthlessly to others.
A nail in the baseboard left unset.
A withered fruit dropped from the pepper plant.
Now this.
Grandeur eludes or bores him,
So he's gone prone,
Licking at the blemish as though its lost dimension might be tasted.
Distraction is his only discipline
And the world is mustered
And patient.

-Fall 1996

I guess on a day in the fall of 1996 my eyes were opened to all kinds of unseen things by my infant son's flailing about on his belly. His perspective was terribly limited. Or maybe I should say his perspective was wonderfully focused.

To use the imagery from Sunday's gospel, I wonder just who in our house in 1996 would have been most likely to find a pearl of great price? At less than a year old Alden couldn't change the oil in my car or macramé a plant hanger. But I saw the world differently, I saw things I wouldn't have because of his perspective--belly to the floor, arms and legs and tongue splayed.

Maybe our obsession with accurate information (which I hope my internist and my accountant never get free of) blinds us to things. It's not that we need to let go of modern knowledge or grow suspicious of modern things. We just need to open ourselves to the possibility that even some strange medieval person might see things in life's forest that our nifty new trees obscure.

The painting is "Hemlock" by Heidi Christensen, an artist who was studying at Virginia Seminary when I was a student.

Ecstasy

Gospel Reading: Matthew 13.24-30, 36-43
(Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)

If I read a book and it makes my body so cold no fire ever can warm me, I know that is poetry.
- Emily Dickenson

For a denomination so obsessed with sex (according to the headlines at least) the Anglican Church is rarely charged with tolerating too much ecstasy. Many of us understand well enough what Tobias Wolff wrote about himself as a student at Oxford: "When we talked about ideas, we treated them dispassionately, donnishly, as if they were moves in a game of chess."

Theology can be a similar exercise. Talking about God can be a safe substitute for an experience of the transcendent.

In English class we're made to memorize lists of poetic devices. We learn about rhyme and meter and simile and metaphor. And we can leave such a class with the impression (unspoken perhaps) that writing poetry is just a matter of careful assembly. As if the making of a poem were comparable to playing with a verbal erector set, bolting this to that to make this lovely other thing. But this doesn't sound like the poetry Emily Dickenson describes. She doesn't know poetry by its parts. She knows it by what it does to her.

I think faith is meant to be much the same. Our talk about the mystery of God was never meant to be a 'donnish' exercise. We're not meant to keep God at a safe distance. In fact, the contact we have with God in our liturgy, in our music, in our strange encounters with God's other children may be preparation for those rarer moments at life's extremes. It's in those experiences in which our bodies go so cold that no fire could ever warm them that faith suddenly matters. That God suddenly matters. That religion is nothing at all like a game of chess. It's a matter of life and death.

The seed parables seem to be safe because their central metaphors happen slowly. But to describe the life of faith as the growth of a seed is to say that it involves the whole being. Faith isn't something that happens out there in the world of ideas. Faith isn't a cosmic game of chess. Faith isn't about comprehending something. It's about being comprehended by something beyond us.

Maybe faith is meant to be a kind of ecstasy. Sometimes a slow and patient ecstasy. Sometimes a sudden inbreaking of the transcendent at life's extremes. But either way we are drawn into or towards the mystery of God. And the religious life becomes no longer something dabbled in, but something that takes hold of us at the core of our being. Like the strange, ordinary miracle of a sown seed growing into wheat.

Conversion: The Wild West

Gospel Reading: Matthew 13.1-9, 18-23
(Click HERE for last Sunday's readings)

Only in Montana do monks keep revolvers in their nightstands. Kathleen Norris tells the story of one such Montana monk who heard a drunk burglar in his cell at 2 a.m. It only took a warning and a cock of the pistol to send the would be thief stumbling into the night, with a "holy s***!"

The reason this encounter was possible was that many monasteries leave their doors unlocked at all times as a gesture of hospitality. It shocked me when I was in seminary in Alexandria, Virginia to find that the doors of the chapel had no locks. And this wasn't rural Montana. This was inside the Washington beltway.

The power of these sorts of open door images arises not only from the hospitality they signify, but from the implicit risk. If the things they contained weren't worth locking up the offering wouldn't be worth much. But because the space behind all those unlocked doors is sacred, vulnerability becomes an offering in itself.

Kathleen Norris suggested that such radical forms of hospitality or generosity can transform people. It may be that I am changed in the realization that something precious or sacred is not being withheld even from me. Some of the power of the Holy Eucharist must derive from this sense.

We read the parable of the sower Sunday, and part of that story seems to be about the conditions for transformation. The soil has to be right. As part of the Episcopal Church I think tending our particular soil for transformation will always involve signifying holy things, and then offering them generously. When we do our liturgy well we know that we are encountering the holy. And in the midst of that encounter we find an unlikely welcome for ourselves. These holy things are offered even to us. This is the beginning of gratitude. And gratitude is the beginning of transformation.

The doors stay open all day here at Christ Church. Is this a dangerous practice? You bet it is. If it weren't, it wouldn't be worth doing.