Thursday, May 21, 2020

O BEAUTY SO ANCIENT AND SO FRESH




Dear People of Holy Comforter, 

Last week we considered the three ways God connects with us, especially in times of trouble (Serenity, Compassion, Life Force). This week we turn our attention to who God is (as opposed to just what God does for us) – and what difference does it make – especially in hard times? Might God just being God help us? That depends on who we believe God is.
     
                 Rabbi Richard Eliot Friedman in The Hidden Face of God[i] followed by Jack Miles in God: A Biography[ii] showed how the literary character of God evolves and shifts in the Hebrew Scriptures. Miles treated the Hebrew Scriptures as if they were one book, a novel. He asked who was the main character. It’s an axiom of literature that the main character is the one who changes most. Miles concluded God must be the main character in the Bible since he changes so much. In his Pulitzer Prize winning book, Miles recounts all the stages the literary character God went through on his way from being the Creator of Heaven and Earth to becoming the Ancient of Days. Rabbi Friedman’s more compelling account shows God evolving from an omnipotent know-nothing to an omniscient do-nothing, handing the Creation over to our care. 

     For our present purposes, we just need to remember that the Biblical writers had different views of God. Then along came Jesus, the ultimate flesh and blood revelation of God – but that didn’t make the differences go away. The views of Jesus vary considerably in the four gospels.[iii] Bottom line: the Bible doesn’t define God for us. It gives us a wealth of stories and images to use as we imagine our way into the infinite mystery. 

     Psychanalysts say that we all have an image of God in our heads. We are neurologically wired that way.[iv] We may believe in that image or not. But it’s there. As for what that image is, Freud said our God always looks like our father. But based on clinical research, contemporary psychoanalyst, Ana-Maria  Rizzuto, says it’s more complicated. We compile God images from many sources, including parents but also other people we’ve met, people we wished for, things we’ve read or heard. We each form our own personal image of God.[v] When I talk with atheists, I find I generally do not believe in the God they don’t believe in either. The God in their head is just a different character from the one in my head. 

                 Those individually constructed God images can be a source of solace, strength, and wisdom. If so, they are blessings to be treasured. But they can also be threatening, shaming, restrictive, and destructive. That’s why we need to measure them up against the teachings of a world religion. Those teachings can support our helpful positive God images. They can heal and liberate us from not-so-helpful God images. Jesuit psychoanalyst W. W. Meissner says that the dialogue between our individual sense of God and the Church’s teachings is a holy thing and grows our souls through a lifetime.[vi] It helps us to connect our God to somebody else’s God. It gives us a common language. And it is possible for our personal God image, even if it is already helpful, to grow or be enriched by a faith tradition. 

                 But what difference does a God image make? Theologian Nicholas Lasch said, “There is no word that is more difficult to use appropriately than ‘God’.”[vii] When Christians say “God,” we do not mean the big guy in the sky, a being like other beings, only bigger and stronger – a being that might or might not exist. We mean the Source, Destiny, and Meaning of Reality. We mean the greatest Beauty, which is the ground of all beauties, the truest Truth which is the ground of all truths, and the greatest Good which is the ground of all goods – that which ultimately matters. 

Theologian Karl Rahner said that the word “God” is so basic to meaning that there could be no language without it. Elsewhere I said,

                 “’God’ is a rich word, the richest word . . . .
                   God is our moral azimuth – the North Star
                   that orients all our values – and our values 
                   orient our actions, indeed our whole life.”[viii]

What depends on what we mean by “God”? Everything. It is basic to our relationship with God. In his classic, Your God Is Too Small, J. B. Philips said most people’s main sense of God is their nagging conscience, and that does not make for a good relationship with our Savior.[ix]

Also, over time, we become more like the God we believe in. I once summarized the views of a wide array of theologians:

        “What makes God ‘God’ in our eyes defines what we 
         believe life is about. If God is God by virtue of  
         absolute power, we worship power. If God is God by  
         virtue of knowing everything, we worship knowledge.
              If God is God by virtue of being the judge of all, we 
         worship judgment. We become like the God we
         believe in. Our image of God determines what we 
         esteem, what we do, and ultimately who we
          become[x]

        Finally, a positive God image can help us through hard times, while an inadequate God image lurking in our minds is not helpful and can even make us feel worse.

So what do Christians mean by “God”? Most modern people assume the first and most defining quality of God is power. But the Church Father (one of the shapers of the Nicene Creed), St. Gregory of Nyssa, American Puritan theologian Jonathan Edwards, contemporary leading Eastern Orthodox theologian, David Bentley Hart, Episcopal theologian, John Westerhoff, and history of ancient theology scholar, Natalie Carnes, agree that the chief attribute of God is Beauty.[xi] God is the ultimate Beauty and all that is beautiful derives its beauty from God. Whenever we see something beautiful, we are catching a glimpse of God. Encountering God’s beauty in the world can give us a much needed jolt of joy especially in hard times. The best, as in most beautiful, expression of this I know is Jack Gilbert’s poem, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7oAERfd4Y7A (If you watch this video twice, I give you my blessing to skip the rest of this letter.  )

“There is laughter every day 

in the terrible streets of Calcutta . . . . 

We must risk delight. . . . 

We must admit that there will be the music 

in spite of everything.” 

 

If we savor Beauty, and look for it even in the “terrible streets of Calcutta,” if we dare “to risk delight,” we are connecting with God as our greatest theologians have understood God through the centuries. And what might it do for us, in hard times, to look for beauty?


     But where does the Beauty come from? What is God’s Beauty? The Trinity is our image of God’s Beauty. It is an image of relationality. It’s our way of saying with 1st John, “God is Love.”[xii] Each person of the Trinity is constituted as God by their Love. Augustine could be fairly paraphrased as saying the Trinity is the Lover, the Beloved, and the Love flowing between them. That is the God Augustine was addressing when he said in The Confessions, “How late I came to Thee . . . . O Beauty so ancient and so fresh!” Divine Love overflows to procreate the whole Creation. A spiral nebula is a picture of Love spinning out Creation in the form of stars. 
https://www.bing.com/images/search?view=detailV2&ccid=JPL6zzkI&id=721F5C36C3700D9B6F50582CE5D6020BB0B2028D&thid=OIP.JPL6zzkIe2Bd2bhtQMGq2wHaEK&mediaurl=https%3a%2f%2fhdwallpaperim.com%2fwp-content%2fuploads%2f2017%2f08%2f22%2f453277-space-stars-nebula-galaxy-space_art-spiral_galaxy-spiral.jpg&exph=1080&expw=1920&q=images+spiral+nebula&simid=608020493838518385&selectedIndex=0&ajaxhist=0
Not a bad picture of God. God’s very nature is relationality. God’s core self is Love for the Other – that which is not God. This is a serious over-simplification but on the path of truth: God has to allow the Creation – not just people, the whole creation – the freedom to stand apart, to reject God, to be ungodly so that the Creation is truly Other than God so God can love it as Other. God’s Love lures the Creation toward Beauty, toward Godself, while loving the Creation even when it is ungodly. God does not dominate, but woos. 
     My concern for our ideas about God is how they affect our attitude toward everything. My hope is that if we believe God is Love (as opposed to power, knowledge, judgment, etc. – God may have those attributes, but they are not what constitutes God as God – I can grow a beard or shave it off but I’m still Dan – the Godness of God is Love) we will be on the lookout for Beauty. Jack Gilbert writes,
                 “To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence 
                 as a rowboat comes slowly out and goes back
                 is truly worth all the years of sorrow 
                 that are to come.”

So what beauty have you seen, heard, touched, tasted, read, thought, or imagined today? When you encountered that beauty, you were brushing shoulders with God. Have you loved anyone or anything today? “Whoever loves has been born of God and knows God . . . . When we love one another,” St. John says, “God abides in us and we abide in God.”[xiii] So notice the beauty. Love the beauty wherever you find it. In times of trouble, keep on the lookout for God.
Blessings always,
Bishop Dan
                 
     



[iii] Richard Burridge, Four Gospels, One Jesus?; Robin Griffiths-Jones, The Four Witnesses, or for a shorter intro, Minka Sprague, One To Watch, One To Pray: Introducing the Gospels https://www.amazon.com/One-Watch-Pray-IntroducingGospels/dp/1596280050/ref=sr_1_3?dchild=1&keywords=one+to+watch+one+to+pray&qid=1590091600&sr=8-3

[viii] Dan Edwards, God of Our Silent Tears, pp. 85-86. (Do not buy from Amazon. The price is too high.)

[ix] J. B. Phillips, Your God Is Too Small. https://www.amazon.com/Your-God-Too-Small-Believers-ebook/dp/B006YDG196/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=jb+phillips+your+god+is+too+small&qid=1590088256&s=books&sr=1-1; For all the virtues of Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis, his view of God at that point was identified with the moral order. His later books take a better view of God.

[x] Edwards, p. 86. But this is by no means an original idea. Constructive theologian, Gordon Kaufman, feminist theologian, Sally Macfague, Roman Catholic transcendental theologian, Karl Rahner, and German liberation theologian, Dorothee Soelle all agree who we become is shaped by our image of God. 

[xi] David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite; Natalie Carnes, Beauty: A Theological Engagement With Gregory Of Nyssa, https://www.amazon.com/Beauty-Theological-Engagement-Gregory-Nyssa-ebook/dp/B00QHRBMJI/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=Carnes+beauty&qid=1590011802&s=books&sr=1-1; Dykstra and Westerhoff, Sensing Beautyhttps://www.amazon.com/Sensing-Beauty-Aesthetics-Spirit-Church/dp/0829812423

[xii] I John 4: 7

[xiii] I John 4: 7, 16.
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Saturday, May 16, 2020

INEXHAUSTIBLE WONDER


When St. Paul brought the gospel to Athens,
    he found a wonderful point of contact.
All around the city were altars to Zeus, Athena, Hermes, 
    Aphrodite, Ares and the rest of the gods.
But in one Athenian temple, 
    Paul found something mysterious
    -- yet somehow familiar to him as a Jew.
He saw an altar dedicated to “the unknown God.”
So when Paul was given a chance 
     to explain his new religion, he told the Athenians 
     he worshiped the unknown God.

In my line of work, people sometimes ask me,
    “So how do you know there is a God?”
And I always think, “How do any of us know anything?”
  
Bear with me, 
      I have to review just two minutes of philosophy. 
The father of modern philosophy, Immanuel Kant, 
    divided reality into two categories.
One category was everything we know 
        or, at least in principle, might someday know.

The other category was the mystery, all the things
     that we do not know and will never know
     because in principle they cannot be known.
As a matter of logic, we can never know 
    what unobserved butterflies are up to.
As J. Krishnamurti put it,  “The eye cannot see itself.”

Kant demonstrated 300 years ago that 
    there is relatively little we can actually know.
But the realm of the unknown and the unknowable 
     is infinite.

20th Century physicist Werner Heisenberg discovered
    that Kant was right even in physics.
Some things just can’t be known.

Around that time, philosopher Martin Heidegger showed 
    how what we do know can block us from knowing 
    other things that might be knowable,
    how our knowledge creates a kind of box 
    that we can never think completely outside of. 

He and Ludwig Wittgenstein both observed 
that we think in language
       and the very structure of language limits 
what we are capable of thinking.
In short, the mystery is vastly larger than the little piece 
   of reality we can see, hear, touch, and measure.

What does that have to do with God? 
Short answer: everything.
Roman Catholic Theologian Karl Rahner said,
    “(Human) knowledge is only a small island in a sea 
that has not been travelled. . . . 
    The question” Rahner said, “is: 
     Which do (w)e love more, 
    the small island of (our) so-called knowledge
    or the sea of infinite mystery?”
Religion is our attitude to that sea.

Protestant Theologian Gordon Kaufman says that God 
       begins where our capacity for knowledge ends.
The knowable world rests on a foundation of mystery.
It comes from mystery.
This is what Paul means when he says,
    “In God we live and move and have our being.”

Until recently, we didn’t know  whether the universe 
had a beginning or not -- but it was always something 
that could in principle be proven.
Today, we know that the Big Bang Theory is right.
That’s how the universe began.

But what was there before the universe?
What was happening five minutes 
before the Big Bang? Who lit the fuse?
That is beyond the reach of human knowledge.

Side note: When the Big Bang was proven,
the greatest philosophical atheist of the 20th Century, 
Anthony Flew, converted to believing in God.
  
We get clues about what the mystery is like
    from the things we can know and experience.
The Anglican poet T. S. Eliot called our religion  
          “hints and guesses.”
The creation gives us reasons to believe the mystery
    is creative and generous, kind and merciful.

We may be wrong. 
But spiritual masters through the ages 
    and around the world
    have believed these good things
    even though they cannot prove them.
Those who gaze in awe at the mystery, those who love it,
    call the mystery “God.”

Agnostics take a different attitude.
Intellectually, they are absolutely right.
God is not a thing you can prove or disprove.
They are intellectually right.
But emotionally, they are like a man 
    who cannot fall in love with a woman
    because he cannot be absolutely certain
             what is in her heart.
Agnostics cannot love the mystery 
    because they don’t know enough about it.
They cannot love what they have not first mastered.

Atheists are another matter still.
I like atheists. They are good for us.
They smash our idols.
They take our too small ideas about God, the little gods
    we keep like genies in bottles to meet our needs.

They show us that our too small ideas about God 
      don’t make sense.
Atheists do us believers a good service 
       by debunking idolatry.
But most atheists, especially these days,
are intellectually arrogant and small minded.
You can see it in their sarcastic mean spirited writing style.

Atheists deny the existence of God
    because they can’t  find his footprints
    or get a picture of him at the Oscars.
They deny God because God is not 
on their little island of knowledge.
God is the sea on which the island floats.
God does not dwell inside the box of things we know.
God is the air outside the box 
     extending forever into space.
The problem with atheists is they worship the box.

Paul, as a good Jew, knew that God is mystery.
That’s why the God of Israel had no name and no image.
You could not say God is this or that.
You could not carve a statue of God.
In the Jerusalem Temple, 
the Ark of the Covenant served as God’s throne.
But the throne was empty.

A conquering general once marched 
    into the Holy of Holies
    and came out contemptuously announcing 
          there was nothing there.
Nations who had a pantheon of little gods 
       called the Jews atheists because they had no god  
       with a name and a statue.
What the other nations didn’t get was 
        that Jews were worshiping “the unknown God.”

Our images of God are always too small.
Rilke wrote,
“We must not portray you in king’s robes,
         you drifting mist that brought forth the morning.”
The greatest Catholic theologian Thomas Aquinas 
    and the greatest Protestant theologian Martin Luther
    disagreed about everything else,
    but they both called God the “deus absconditus”
                 – the hidden God –
    because God doesn’t fit inside the human mind.
The human mind fits inside God.
As St. Augustine said, “If you understand it, it isn’t God.”

That’s why any religion peddling the answers
    is to be avoided at all costs.
Such religions are mind killers and soul shrinkers.
True religion stands in awe at the shore 
     of oceanic mystery.

We don’t have all the answers. 
We have very few answers.
But we have a warehouse full of marvelous questions.

Our doctrines are not platitudes to satisfy simple minds.
They are puzzles and enigmas 
    – a God who is three and one;
    a savior who is fully human and fully divine;
             a God powerful enough to create the universe
             but vulnerable enough to hang on a cross.
Whatever we say about God is not to define God, 
to pin God down,
    but to make us shake our heads 
and know that we do not know.

What is the point of a religion that stands 
in awe rather than certainty?
The point is that it draws us outside ourselves,
    outside the walls of what we think we know,
    beyond the prison of our pride
    into something larger, vastly larger, 
    than all the ideologies,
    all the self-help guides to fixing our own lives,
    all the programs and platforms humankind can imagine.
It leads us into wonder, inexhaustible wonder.
                               
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Thursday, May 14, 2020

WHAT IS GOD DOING IN THE PANDEMIC?




Dear People of Holy Comforter, 

 “My life flows on in endless song
Above earth’s lamentation
I hear the sweet and far off hymn
That hails a new creation.
Through all the tumult and the strife
I hear the music ringing.
It finds an echo in my heart
How can I keep from singing?
No storm can shake my inmost calm
While to that rock I’m clinging.
Since Christ is Lord of heaven and earth,
How can I keep from singing?”
-- Robert Lowry

 On September 11, 2001, I was parish priest in Macon, Georgia. I had not a clue what how to respond pastorally in my congregation. But the Bishop directed us to hold a worship service, so we did. We found some lessons that fit. But for the sermon, I had no wisdom to offer. What I had was e-mails from my friends in New York City describing the darkness, the fear, and the desolation there. So I read their e-mails to the congregation and wept. They wept too. Then my wife Linda sang this song we had first heard on retreat on the Holy Isle of Iona. 

 “No storm can shake my inmost calm
While to that rock I’m clinging.
Since Christ is Lord of heaven and earth,
How can I keep from singing?”

 It felt profoundly true that night -- as if that was the only truth that mattered. “While Christ is Lord of heaven and earth, how can I keep from singing?”  

 So who is this Christ who redeems our suffering? How does he redeem it? What does it mean that he is “Lord of heaven and earth?” In last week’s letter, we talked about finding meaning in our hardships. We said emphatically that God does not cause our hardships, and that the meaning we find in our hardships does not justify them. A cloud with a silver lining is still a cloud. But the silver lining gives us hope. This week, we ask, “What’s God doing about it?” Looking for God in the midst of isolation, disorientation, and death is at the heart of our quest for meaning because “God” is our word for the meaning of this whole epic of journey of life. God is the Source, the Destiny, and the Meaning. God is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. So who is God and what is God doing about our calamity? 

 Something remarkable happened to human understanding in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. Basically, it disrupted our fixed assumptions about God. It took several centuries to make sense of it. When it came together in the Creed that defines our faith, we had a revolutionary understanding of God, which means a revolutionary new understanding of the Source, Destiny, and Meaning of life. We expressed that new understanding in metaphorical, poetic language because that is the only language in which we can stammer about the unspeakable mystery of God. We did not claim to have defined God, reduced God to a doctrine, or found a way to fit the Eternal inside our little skulls. But we had a new sense of God and we expressed it as the Trinity.

 The image of the Trinity is a way of speaking about two things. The first has an off-putting academic name – the “Social Trinity.” I call it the “Family Trinity.” The Trinity is an image of who God is when home alone. It’s about God’s inner nature. The other meaning of the Trinity has an equally odd name – the “Economic Trinity.” I call it the “Job Description Trinity.” It means God reaches out to us in three different ways. To contemplate God, we have to consider both parts of the Trinity. But in times of stress, when we are worried for ourselves and each other, it’s the Job Description Trinity that is front and center for our concern. So let’s start there. The ancient language for the Trinity is regrettably gendered. I’ll use it for the sake of familiarity, but I’ll also use other language that will hopefully move our imaginations past the gendered language. 

 It would be easier if we kept our image of God simple, one-dimensional. But when people have tried to do that, the results have not been good. The God they wound up with was often a cold, abstract principle or a celestial tyrant giving orders and coercing obedience. So even the most monotheistic world religions have acknowledged complexity in God. The Hebrew Scriptures call God a rock, a fortress, a parent, a mother bird, a king, a storm, a warrior, a lover, an earthquake. The Jewish Kabballah has 9 sefirot, or names of God, that are not just different names but different aspects of God. But wait, Islam has the “99 Beautiful Names of Allah.” The pre-Jewish fertility goddess, known as Ishtar among other names, was called the “goddess with a thousand faces.”  So, bear with us if Christianity’s poetry about God presents us with three distinct ways in which God appears to us. 

The First Person of the Trinity, usually called God the Father, is often confused with being the real God, with the Son and the Holy Spirit being his first and second officers. But that is not Christian teaching. We see all three persons of the Trinity as co-equal, each expressing equally valid parts of God. The First Person of the Trinity is the Serene Center of Reality. T. S. Eliot wrote,

 “At the still point of the turning world
At the still point, there the dance is
Except for the point, the still point,
                        There would be no dance
                        And there is only the dance.” 

 The Early and Medieval Church stressed that the Father is balanced, centered wisdom. They used the word “dispassionate” to say God is beyond time, beyond change, and above all beyond suffering. 

 That preached to Greco-Roman folks steeped in Stoic philosophy. But to us “dispassionate” sounds cold, uncaring, aloof from our very real pain. We are apt to construct a more sentimental image of God. We want a God who would be a sympathetic guest on a talk show. There are legitimate reasons to object to a dispassionate God who literally has no feelings, who is anesthetized to suffering. Theologian Dorothee Soelle rejects the traditional picture of “divine apathy” because it leads to human apathy. Only a God who cares, Soelle says, can teach us to care.  A platoon of theologians I admire line up with her – Moltmann, Plantinga, McGrath, Whitehead, Hartshorne, and the whole school of Liberation Theology. Granted, they are partly right. Second Century Greeks might worship, adore, and emulate a Star Trek Vulcan. We can’t, shouldn’t, and won’t. 

 But before we throw the baby out with the bath, I need to say Modernity’s God, the “fellow sufferer who understands,” is too small a God to get us through. As theologian, Karl Rahner, says:

 “It does not help me escape from my mess, my mix-up,  
                and despair if God is in the same (situation) . . . .
From the beginning, I am locked into the horribleness.” 

 Think, in the beginning is suffering. Our destiny is more suffering. The way through it is suffering. And the meaning of it all is suffering. Such a God offers companionship but no hope.

 There are two answers to this problem. The first is that the First Person of the Trinity is part of God, not all of God. Just as each of us is complex, made up of a combination of subpersonalities, God is complex. There is a part of God who suffers with us. That’s the Second Person of the Trinity. More on that soon. The second answer is to clarify what we mean by the Serenity of God. 

 Instead of saying the Father is “dispassionate” or “apathetic,” it is more correct to say God is differentiated. The Father cares, but calmly, confidently. The Father has feelings, but is not overcome by feelings. The Father can remain centered, balanced, because of his unique ability to take the long view of eternity. Because of his certainty that “all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well” as he said to Julian of Norwich as she lay stricken by the Black Death, we have a God who cares for us but is not anxious about us. Such a God can be the Serene Center. Such a God can be our Rock. 


“What though my joys and comforts die
                          The Lord my Savior liveth.
                          What though the darkness gather round
                          Songs in the night he giveth
                         No storm can shake my inmost calm
While to that rock I’m clinging.
Since Christ is Lord of heaven and earth,
How can I keep from singing?”

 “Rock of Ages cleft for me
Let me hide myself in thee.”

 There is in God a Serene Center who is the firm foundation of our hope. We can connect with that Serene Center through the Scriptures, through our hymns, but best of all through prayer and meditation. When we set our anxieties aside and place ourselves before the presence of the God who is and was and ever shall be, our lives fall into perspective. 

 "Through all the tumult and the strife
I hear the music ringing.
It finds an echo in my heart
How can I keep from singing?"

 Just as there is a Serene Center in God, there is Serene Center in each of us. It is the same Serene Center. “No storm can shake my inmost calm.” If we want to seek God in “the tumult and the strife”, the place to look is within, to attend to the “echo (of God’s serenity) in my heart.” Turn off the news, let the world flow by, be still and know that God is God, God is still God, always has been, always will be. That’s why “all shall be well.” That doesn’t make our troubles poof disappear; but it puts them in perspective.

 The Second Person of the Trinity is altogether different, and mercifully so. Despite the fashions of modern theology, many Christians still think of God as sitting placidly at a safe distance from our grief and anxiety. Those good people have not gotten the point of the Incarnation. God was not in heaven nodding assent to the crucifixion. God was on the cross. We call the Second Person of the Trinity “God the Son” and think rightly of Jesus of Nazareth. God the Son became flesh in Jesus. But Scripture is clear that God the Son was from the Beginning and is co-eternal with the Father. The historical Jesus was the ultimate expression of God the Son, but that part of God was always engaged with Creation and is engaged with us today – but in a different way from the Father. 

 The Father appears to us as a vastness, a great distance. The Son is “closer to us than we are to ourselves” as Meister Eckhart said. We glimpse the Father aspect of God when the desert sky, a mighty river, the mountains, or the ocean evoke the perspective of eternity. We meet the Son in the present moment – now, now, and now. Boris Pasternak said, “The instant far more than hours and ages is eternity’s rival.” The 17th Century Jesuit Jean-Pierre de Causade wrote of “the sacrament of the present moment.” Buddhists such as Tich Nhat Hahn create a whole spirituality of attention to the present moment. “Be here now,” the late Ram Dass said. 

 Much of our suffering consists of fantasies of future sorrows. We borrow trouble. Or we dwell on old sadness, stuck in the past. Letting go of – at least loosening our grip on -- fantasized futures and sticky memories can spare us considerable anxiety and allow us to actually show up for our lives, which are happening now. We can meet Christ in this moment, only in this moment. Now.  But sometimes the present moment is painful. Some moments are excruciating. What then?

 Jesus reveals how the Son responds to our suffering. His response includes the crucifixion, but it isn’t just that. The Gospels show Jesus searching and longing as we do – going to John the Baptist looking for a religious experience to change his life, going to the desert looking for his mission, trying to explain himself to his hometown but they don’t get it, exhausted and retiring for prayer, exasperated with his disciples who just don’t or won’t understand, weeping over Jerusalem and at the grave of Lazarus, desperately seeking deliverance from death in the Garden of Gethsemane but hearing only silence, and finally feeling abandoned on the cross. Jesus suffers with us every inch of the way. “No, never alone” the Gospel song says. “I will be with you.,” God says in Isaiah” 

              “So do not fear, for I am with you;
          do not be dismayed, for I am your God.
              I will strengthen you and help you;
              I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.” 

 Because Christ dwells in us and we in him, whatever we suffer, he suffers. One of the great errors wrongly attributed to Christianity is the idea that Jesus suffers instead of us, dies so we don’t have to. But clearly we still suffer. We still die. The Son doesn’t suffer instead of us. He suffers with us. God the Son is Compassion, which literally means “to suffer with.”

 That raises the question: so what? What good does it do for God the Son to suffer with us? There are several good answers to that question. I’ll just offer the one that makes most sense to me. Philosopher Marilyn McCord Adams says that our redemption from suffering comes from our relationship with God whose Beauty and Goodness exceed all the ills of the created order, whose Love is so profound that in the fullness of time, it will wipe away every tear and redeem the whole experience of life including the tragedies. But where do we meet that Redeemer? We can’t climb up to Heaven. So he meets us where we are, on the field of suffering. By sharing our pain, God the Son turns our suffering into common ground, the place we establish the human-divine relationship that leads to “wonder, love, and praise.” God does not want us to stay stuck in suffering. It’s something to pass through – together – on our way to joy. But suffering is the point on the journey where our paths converge. 

 I once spent an hour in a hotel lobby in Detroit in the wee hours – long story involving the norovirus and a fire alarm – along with the Bishop of Europe and a House of Bishops translator, arguing our case for faith with an Iranian atheist. At the end, as he was leaving he said, “Ok. Well I don’t need God. But if I ever do, I’ll think about it.” We said, “that’s fine.” I felt pretty sure he’d need God one of these days. He may need God right now.  

 So to find God the Son in this ordeal, we can start with our own anxiety, loneliness, frustration, resentment, the whole kit and kaboodle of negativity that plagues our days and nights, then know Jesus is feeling precisely the same thing to precisely the same degree. That’s because he loves us too much to let us do it without him. We are in this together. We can also see him in the hardships and the deaths of others. And we can see him serving the suffering with care. In a recent class I asked the group to imagine a hospital room with an intubated patient struggling for life, a doctor, and a nurse. I asked which one of them represented Jesus. The answer was all of them. Jesus isn’t hard to find these days. He’s just about everywhere you look. 

 We need God to be the Serene Center and also the Fellow Sufferer who cares.  But there is more. The Third Person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit. In our day, we often confuse the Holy Spirt with a religious emotion we can work up. But our feelings, sincere, strong, and religious as they may be, are still our human feelings. They are not God. The Holy Spirit is a co-equal, co-eternal part of God. The Holy Spirit literally is God manifesting as breath or wind. It corresponds to what French philosopher Henri-Louis Bergson called the “elan vital,” the Life Force active through eternity and in creation. The Creed calls the Holy Spirit “the Lord, the Giver of Life.” God gave life to Adam by breathing his spirit into Adam’s nostrils. When Jesus lay dead in the tomb, the Holy Spirit restored him to life. Duke Theologian Geoffrey Wainwright says the Hebrew Scriptures show the Holy Spirit doing three things:

         1. Creating
        2. Bestowing life 
             (which in the Gospels includes restoring life that was lost)
        3. Empowering prophets, judges, kings, and warriors 

           Our ultimate hope lies in the Resurrection, but we don’t have to wait that long. We can’t wait that long. We need help now. Sometimes when disaster strikes, we say “it knocked the wind out of my sails.” Calamities and disappointments can sap our elan vital (vital momentum), our envie de continuer (will to go on). Losing that momentum, that will, is like losing God’s Spirit. The Psalmist prayed, “Take not your holy spirit from me  . . .  Sustain me with your bountiful spirit.”  The classic Biblical account of this experience is The Valley of Dry Bones in Ezekiel 37. The prophet surveys the valley of dry bones representing the people of Israel, defeated and despairing in exile. God shows the prophet this vision of desolation and asks, “Son of man, can these bones live?” Then the Lord says to the hopeless, forsaken exiles taken from their homeland and enslaved, “I will put my Spirit in you, and you shall live.” Then the bones stood up. Jesus promises in the 4th Gospel to send us a “paraklete,” which we usually translate as comforter or consoler, but Archbishop William Temple says that is a regressive translation. The term means more of a strengthener.  And leading Episcopal theologian John Macquarrie said the work of the Holy Spirit is “to enlighten and strengthen us.” 

 But how does that work? There are two ways. The first is that God is not dominating everything that happens in creation. If God did that, there would be nothing other than God to be in relationship with God, history would have not meaning, and we would not truly live. But God is involved in the world through the life-giving actions of the Holy Spirit. God influences things and the more we invite God into the world through prayer, the more we free God up to do the good God already longs to do. 

 The second way God strengthens us is quite paradoxical. When the Spirit raises us from despair, she does not just restore our old life. Life in the Spirit has a new agenda. When the Spirt descended on prophets or kings, it was not just to cheer them up but to empower them for a mission to others. Paul is clear in I Corinthians 12 that spiritual gifts aren’t just for the benefit of those who receive them, but so they can serve others. Jesus said the same about why the Spirit was on him.  Macquarrie said:

“Spirit may be described as the capacity for going out of
                oneself and beyond oneself . .  for transcending oneself . . 
The more a (person) goes out from himself, the more the
                spiritual dimension of his life is deepened, the more he 
becomes truly (human). 

            Carol, a woman in a congregation I served. lost her 20 year old daughter in the crash of TWA 800 and was prostrated with grief. Later Joanne, another woman in the congregation, a lonely woman with no family, was dying of renal failure. She needed someone to care for her. So the bereaved mother stepped out of her grief to care for the dying fellow church member. Carol later said that Joanne had saved her life by needing her help. The Spirit lifts us up from our woes to carry Christ’s love to a world in desperate need of it. 

 Turning the question around is also asking the same question in a different way. In an old Pontius Puddle cartoon, one character says, “Sometimes I’d like to ask God why he doesn’t do something about war, famine, disease, injustice and pollution.” The other replies, “Then why don’t you just ask him?” The first admits, “I’m afraid he might ask me the same question.” St. Theresa of Avila famously said,

 “Christ has no body on earth but yours
 No hands, no feet on earth but yours
Yours are the eyes with which he looks 
Compassion on this world.”

 When we ask how God is responding to the pandemic, it is the same as asking how are we to respond to it. There are three leading secular prescriptions: Submission (just accept that life is like this); Stoicism (avoid suffering by changing what you can to prevent suffering and ignoring the rest); and Rebellion (shaking our fist at the sky). Each has its appeal but is ultimately unsatisfactory and shrinks our souls. 

 The Christian answer is that our response mirrors God’s tripartite participation – Serenity, Compassion, and Redeeming Action. We practice Serenity because it’s sane and the world needs sanity in a time of crisis. Compassion is caring about each other, people we know and people we don’t. Compassion is vulnerable. It exposes us to caring about what we can’t control. But to shut down compassion is to shut out life. Compassion lets life in. Redeeming action is helping others in practical ways. When we are isolated, we are apt to feel helpless. But we can do what we can do. it may be a phone call, a letter, a gift, delivering someone groceries, writing a check to a Food Bank, or calling your Congressional representative to support needed governmental response to the situation. “God has not given us a spirit of fear but of power.”  We have the power to do good now. It may be doing good in different ways from last year. But that keeps us alert. I have two poet friends, Donald and Claudia, husband and wife. They live in Las Vegas, which as you may have heard, is in the desert. To ward off “omnicorus nostalgia,” (I misread it as omnivorous) they are planting trees. They are planting trees at a home they will sell next year. The trees will be for someone else. So, look around you and plant something – either literally or figuratively, it doesn’t matter. 

 The Japanese symbol which we translate as crisis is two symbols overlaid. One means danger. The other means opportunity. A crisis is a dangerous opportunity. This is a unique opportunity to know God, to connect with God, to become more fully human. The two basic key actions are: 1. Pay attention. Keep an eye out for God active in our midst. 2. Mirror God in your own attitudes and actions. We are in this together. 

 Blessings always,
Bishop Dan

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