Holy Week: What We Learn from Looking into the Dark

March 30th, 2010 | 5 Comments

It’s Holy Week, a time in the liturgical year that draws Christians into and through great darkness. But there is plenty of darkness in the world—why do we need to invite more? I don’t relish the thought of entering into the stories of betrayal and fear, of manipulation by people in power and humanity’s willingness to extinguish a light. It would be easier to take if that had all changed now, but we know it isn’t so. Even knowing that this story has a good ending, it’s not an easy one to engage with.

I approach this week thinking, “not again.” Why is this, of all weeks, the one labeled “holy?” It’s a week filled with unholy actions as well as holy moments, like all of life. Why is its suffering and desolation what we choose to lift up?

Nonetheless, it comes ‘round every year. And like any observance that occurs with that regularity, it brings a chance to look at a familiar ritual from the slightly different perspective that another year of living brings.

This year, I’m noticing that the story shows how quickly things turn around: from celebration and adoration to arrest and death; from horror at the crucifixion of a beloved teacher to wonder at the empty tomb. The first Easter morning wasn’t yet a triumph, but it brought hope wrapped in mystery. What the disciples thought was over was made open-ended. Despair was replaced with questions that led them to a new place.

In this week of reversals we celebrate the consistent thread running through all of them. Jesus knew who he was and what he was about, regardless of how the world around him shifted. Reality wasn’t determined by the crowd’s response, good or bad, but by his certain connection with God.

He knew his time was limited and he knew what was important. When the world was growing dark he washed his disciples’ feet and shared a meal in a way that remains in our memory today.

Holy Week shows us that everything in the world comes to an end. But we can endure it, knowing that life moves beyond the endings we can see, and that darkness does not have the final word.

Do you find light in this week of darkness? What do you do with Holy Week?

Comments (5) | Finding Courage,Soul Tending Tags: , , , , ,

The Real Fight

March 26th, 2010 | 6 Comments

The hate spilling into public spaces and political discourse in this country feels to me like a flash flood these days. I knew that river was there, but as long as it kept within its banks I could approach warily and life continued as usual. But now bridges are washed out and the angry torrents are sweeping through all kinds of communities.

It’s frightening to see.

All that anger, all that fear, directed at some evil “other,” is a horrendous force. When some other person, or institution, or ideology comes to stand for everything we detest, we lose the ability to think rationally about the dynamic we’re engaged in.

Things become artificially simple when we disregard the humanity of the other person. It unleashes the darkness within us. When that happens, we lose our own humanity and evil prevails. Jesus was truly looking after us, speaking out of love and concern, when he said “Love your enemies.”

We all need to be asking: What’s behind all the anger? What are we really afraid of? When someone in the media really pushes my buttons and I feel the swelling tide that wants to drown them out, what exactly is going on?

The true answers are not the huge concepts, not the vague generalities, but the specific and deeper things. Personal ones. What am I personally afraid of? What is the source of the anger that is mine?

If the enemy is painted large enough to be an easy target, we don’t have to be specific about what we’re fighting, or clear about what we stand for. To really know our enemy we have to understand who we are, and face what lies within us. That is the first fight, and the one that’s necessary for peace.

Comments (6) | Finding Courage Tags: , , , , , ,

The Kaleidoscope of Divine Names

March 23rd, 2010 | 2 Comments

Names for God: Part 3 of a Series

The dozens of names used for God in the bible include beautiful and imaginative ones, evidence of long history and deep relationship with the Holy One beyond names. Each name for God stretches to articulate a particular experience of the sacred: beautiful, bright hope in Morning Star, the source and end of all in Alpha and Omega, the object of longing in Desire of All Nations, ever-renewing strength and refreshment in a Fountain, the steady certainty of a Rock, just to name a few. It’s interesting to scan such lists as the biblical names for God here, and names for the different aspects of the trinity here.

Jesus names his relationship with the source of life, strength, and guidance by referring to the divine as Father, suggesting a closer and more intimate relationship than the traditional Lord. He is also naming a divine relationship when he refers to himself as the vine and his followers as the branches.

The names we use are necessarily metaphorical—suggestions for ways of thinking of God based on something we’ve experienced of God and of the world. Maybe it is tender love, or transforming power; it could be a light in the dark, or a stone rolled away; it might be a new way of seeing our circumstances, or a sense of connection to another person. We say God is love, strength, vision, light, renewal, unity—all describe God, none is the final word.

Any name or metaphor reflects a single flash of perspective—one bit of colored light in the kaleidoscope of names, one of myriad possibilities for describing an experience or relationship with God. None is complete, so any name used exclusively becomes false. If God is always Almighty, then we may miss the still, small voice. If God is always He, then our sense of God is not only limited to masculine traits and roles, but to human ones. If the divine is just another being, much like another person only magnified, we may not be prepared to encounter other expressions of the holy.

Learning to use a variety of names for God has enriched my faith. My spiritual life grew deeper when I began to think of God in new ways, with new names. Allowing my understanding of God to grow has helped me to grow.

May the faithful ever continue to conceive new names for the divine, and may those names be accepted into living, growing communities of faith.

Are there names for God that you resist? What names are most resonant for you?

You might also be interested in:

Part 1: Post Cards from the Divine

Part 2: Naming the Ineffable

Comments (2) | Prayer,Soul Tending Tags: , , ,

Naming the Ineffable

March 20th, 2010 | 3 Comments

Names for God: Part 2 of a Series

Woven into the fabric of Hebrew tradition is the wise teaching that the name of God is never to be uttered. The powerful and mysterious name, given in the story of Moses’ encounter with God in the form of a burning bush, is usually translated “I Am What I Am.” It’s the designation of something more than we can grasp, not to be treated lightly. A reader of the Hebrew substitutes adonai, or “the Lord,” when reading scripture aloud.

Any other name denotes an individual we can know, someone with particular characteristics and habits, whose existence necessarily means limitations, a being among other beings. But this name is different, one that we cannot wield with understanding, a name beyond names.

I’m drawn to that mystery, but if God is beyond what can be named, it’s hard to know where to begin. How can I even think about, much less have a relationship with, the unfathomable source of life?

A sense of divine presence is somewhere to start, or the longing to experience it. The Psalms speak to that kind of knowing: As a deer longs for flowing streams, so my soul longs for you, O God. We can’t claim the stream, or apprehend its course; but we know our need for it and the experience of being refreshed by its waters.

And we have not only our own individual experience to draw on, but that of countless generations who have gone before. Many left their mark on the world’s faith traditions. When we find a line of liturgy or scripture or interpretation that resonates, we have a guide who helps us prepare for our own experience of the divine. We have gifts of poetry, art, and music that can open our hearts and point the way. The earth itself speaks eloquently of divine beauty, renewal, and creativity.

The unutterable name of God is spelled out everywhere, if only we can learn to read.

I’d love to hear about your experience. What stirs in you a sense of divine presence, or longing? Is it something you seek out in the rituals and routines of your life, or something that takes you by surprise?

You might also be interested in:

Part 1: Post Cards from the Divine

Part 3: The Kaleidoscope of Divine Names

Comments (3) | Paying Attention,Soul Tending Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Post Cards from the Divine

March 16th, 2010 | 2 Comments

Names for God: Part 1 of a Series

I had seen reproductions of Vincent Van Gogh’s paintings long before visiting the d’Orsay in Paris, so I expected that viewing his work would be an encounter with something familiar. It never occurred to me that the originals might hold so much more than those reproductions could show.

It left me completely unprepared for the experience I stumbled into. I was stunned by the vibrancy, riveted by the color. The skies he painted came at me like a physical force.

Maybe it was having recently enjoyed the saturated blues of Mediterranean evenings; maybe it was the mindset of a traveler taking in everything new. I don’t know what opened me to the power of Van Gogh’s canvasses, I only know that I have never experienced color the way I did standing before his paintings. I have never had a sky brought to life and emblazoned on my mind in the same way. For twenty or thirty minutes I couldn’t take in anything else. I was left with an image, or more specifically a color, that overtook everything. That blue.

I bought post cards before leaving the museum—replicas of some of the paintings I had seen. They were pale imitations; the colors were wrong, the depth flattened out, the life drained. The reproductions were just reminders of what I had seen, nothing like standing in front of the real thing. But nonetheless I’m glad for the mementos. Years later, the post cards help me remember the experience of taking in the works of art and being moved by them.

I framed one of the Van Gogh cards and placed it on my desk. I love the image, the color, the conveyance of light, the sense of shelter. It gives me pleasure. I enjoy the framed post card, but it only hints at the power of the original. It doesn’t begin to reveal the divine inspiration Van Gogh conveyed on canvas. And I suspect that even his amazing painting would have fallen short of fully capturing the inspiration he felt, as works of art tend to do.

The words we use to talk about God are a lot like that framed post card. Our names for God are accessible, we can make them part of our lives, they hold meaning and beauty. We fit them into frames on our desks—in readings and hymns, conversation, worship and prayers. But we miss out when we confuse those names with the real thing. We cut ourselves off from the experience of the divine when we think that the little image in the frame is the object of our longing or the expression of our desire.

We need names for God, yet any name for God is a placeholder, a reminder of what will not fit in the frame, what cannot be named.

Is “God” a name that suggests the ineffable for you? What name are you drawn to using?

You might also be interested in:

Part 2: Naming the Ineffable

Part 3: The Kaleidoscope of Divine Names

Comments (2) | Creativity,Paying Attention,Soul Tending Tags: , , , ,

Making Peace with What You Can Do

March 13th, 2010 | 2 Comments

Walking in the early spring air this morning, I got by with a light cotton jacket. Yet the weather remains cool and damp. Green fronds push up from the ground, but the skies are grey. Trees are full of birdsong, though the bare branches appear unchanged since winter.

This almost-spring feels nothing like winter, yet there is no blossoming. As if the earth is saying: This, today, is what I can do. I can bring forth this much, but for now I can go no farther.

And the slow warming is enough. The turning of the seasons is exactly this; nothing more is needed. There is no hurry, no catching up to do. All is sufficient.

***

It’s tempting to discount those efforts we are able to make. How do you make peace with the limits of what you can do?

Comments (2) | Inspiration in the Everyday,Seasons Tags: , , , ,

The View Through Old Glass

March 11th, 2010 | 3 Comments

Looking through old glass feels a little like standing outside of time. The wavery, watery pane distorts the view just enough to hold it in perspective, as a fleeting moment in the long passage of years. It holds the scene at a distance, even as it offers a reminder of life’s fragility. An old window softens the world.

The old glass reveals motion I cannot perceive otherwise: the imperceptible turn of the earth with its accrual of days into seasons, a year, a lifetime; the pull of gravity over time, drawing down the pane into ripples and waves, pulling at my body in the same way. All the moments count, no one of them more or less than another, which is hard to take because that’s not how we see our lives.

Time passes without our noticing, yet it leaves its mark. The view through old glass notes the brevity of a moment, even as it attests to the lasting change a moment’s passing leaves. It’s an image of the weight of the past, and of the vitality that sets this moment apart.

It shows our days to be part of a long unfolding, part of something larger. At the same time, it invites an appreciation of the moment as all we have.

If I could see the view through the other side of the glass, look through the curving lines of light at myself, would I understand something more about my life?

Comments (3) | Inspiration in the Everyday Tags: ,

Opening to the Sacred

March 8th, 2010 | 2 Comments

In The Case for God, Karen Armstrong talks about “this hinterland between rationality and the transcendent.” It’s the place where our thought, ideas, and intellectual life have taken us as far as they can, and we need a different kind of knowing in order to experience God.

The intellect is part of our spiritual path. It carries us past the limited notions of God that constrict our assumption of what religious life entails. It brings the fresh breeze of new ideas, which prepare us to see what we have missed. It shows the limitations we have put on God, and the experience of God, of which we were unaware.

But we can’t live into a new faith, or any faith, by intellect alone. An expanded idea of God doesn’t have much impact on who we are or how we live unless we develop a connection to God—asking, seeking, waiting, inviting, listening. In Armstrong’s words, “Religious insight requires not only a dedicated intellectual endeavor to get beyond the ‘idols of thought’ but also a compassionate lifestyle that enables us to break out of the prism of selfhood. . . . It require[s] kenosis, ‘negative capability,’ ‘wise passiveness,’ and a heart that ‘watches and receives.’”

Armstrong’s book mirrors this process. It summarizes and analyzes a long and complex history of how people have understood God. She places our current theological thinking in the context of history, the better to see how we arrived in this place and how best to move forward. Yet her work points to an understanding of God beyond definition or certainty, experienced in mystery, expressed in poetry and in love. It’s a book about what cannot be expressed in books.

Ideas are important; I thrive on them. Yet at a certain point ideas no longer satisfy. It’s like driving to the mountains to go hiking. At some point, you have to get out of the car.

I experience another kind of truth in the light turning gold as the sun rises, the purr of a cat under my hand, the voice of a loved one. These are openings to the sacred, to the sense of being deeply and truly alive.

I’m asking myself whether I’ve spent too much time reading theology and not enough reading poetry. Where is the balance between intellect and experience? Do you see one as more credible, or trustworthy, than the other?

Comments (2) | Books I'm Reading,Inspiration in the Everyday Tags: , , , ,

A Church of Unknowing

March 6th, 2010 | 2 Comments

I’ve just finished reading Karen Armstrong’s The Case for God (Knopf, 2009). It’s a big book to wade through, but the clarity and grace of her writing make it a pleasure. Even more, her ideas stimulate my own thinking. I won’t try to do a review or a summation, but here is one aspect that resonates with me.

One of the gifts of The Case for God is that Armstrong articulates clearly how the modern Western mind came to equate truth with certainty, knowledge with logic and definitions, and credibility with science. Even more, she shows how this way of thinking resulted in a notion of God disconnected from the heart of religious longing.

Rather than allowing language and logic to carry us to their limit, then point us toward the mystery that cannot be named or known, we settled for a list of God-traits. Our idea of God defined a being, with specific attributes, sitting at the next-higher level of creation. In Armstrong’s words:

The process that should have led to a stunned appreciation of an “otherness” beyond the competence of language ended prematurely. The result is that many of us have been left stranded with an incoherent concept of God. We learned about God at about the same time as we were told about Santa Clause. But while our understanding of the Santa Claus phenomenon evolved and matured, our theology remained somewhat infantile.

We need an understanding of God that holds up to our experience, and allows us to build a life around our faith. Armstrong points to the work of Gianni Vattimo and John D. Caputo as thinkers who embrace a way of seeing God that can speak to our time. She mentions in her notes a collection containing works by both of them, After the Death of God, edited by Jeffrey W. Robbins. I haven’t read it, but I’d like to.

This is how Armstrong describes Caputo’s view of our experience of God, and the unknowing that is “truth without knowledge”:

So how does Caputo see God? Following Derrida, he would describe God as the desire beyond desire. Of its very nature, desire is located in the space between what exists and what does not; it addresses all that we are and are not, everything we know and what we do not know. The question is not “Does God exist?” any more than “Does desire exist?” The question is rather “What do we desire?” Augustine understood this when he asked, “What do I love when I love my God?” and failed to find an answer.

An encounter with such mystery leaves us open, without certainty, thrillingly alive and humbled with awe. It points us to a reality that transcends our ordinary experience, calls us to be awake, and encourages us to seek ways of living out the ineffable truth that we are given.

Is it possible to live out this kind of truth in community? Can a church be built on faith that professes uncertainty and not knowing?

Comments (2) | Books I'm Reading,Paying Attention,Soul Tending Tags: , , , , ,

The Taste of Chartreuse

March 3rd, 2010 | 3 Comments

In this season of almost spring (a time described beautifully by Amy Oscar at her blog: Story, Spirit, Seed), I find myself thinking about the taste of Chartreuse. The flavor suggests the greening of the earth, the scent of mown grass and fresh herbs, the return of the sun in spring. Even its luminous yellow-green color speaks of new life.

It’s still a bit early to retrieve the bottle from the dark recesses of the kitchen cabinet. But for the first time in months I remember it’s there, waiting. Its distillation of past growing seasons holds the memory and anticipation of spring.

Chartreuse and its secret recipe have a fascinating history, which lends a delicious mystique to the experience of drinking it. I first tasted the liqueur in the company of dear friends after we watched Into Great Silence together. The film shows the passing of a year in the Carthusian monastery of La Grande Chartreuse, where Chartreuse has been made for centuries.

To watch the film is to experience something of the monastic life, with its beauty and tradition, as well as its constriction and mundaneity. The film evokes both yearning for the spare beauty of the monastery and claustrophobia at its repeated routines. It has no speaking, no soundtrack, only a few frames containing a word or two of French. Sounds such as the creak of a monk’s kneeling bench are heightened, enveloped in profound silence. It’s a beautiful film of changing light and unchanging ritual. I was glad to share its silence with friends, and also glad to speak with them about it afterwards.

The elixir made by the monks is lovely to sip on its own. Mixing it with the clear, cold effervescence of club soda makes a wonderful drink as well, something like the taste of winter giving way to spring.

That transition is a process happening now, at least for those of us in the Northern hemisphere. But how do we know when to celebrate?

Comments (3) | Inspiration in the Everyday,Seasons Tags: , , , ,
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