Paths to Trinitarian Life and Prayer

This essay was published nine years ago in the "Proclaiming Gospel  Justice" section of the late lamented magazine The Witness's online version. It remained up on the Web long after the magazine and its A Globe of Witnesses online incarnation ceased publication, until fairly recently.  I found a cached copy of the essay this week and reproduce it here. Thanks again to The Witness and its then Editor, Ethan Vesely-Flad, for offering me the opportunity to reflect on the challenging topic of the Trinity in the light of the scriptures from Year A of the Lectionary.

We are in Year A of the Lectionary again and I am preaching this weekend (in an Episcopal parish south of Boston). I may crib from myself a bit in the sermon... For now, study and prayer!

Andrei Rublev (15th c.), "Trinity"

 Paths to Trinitarian Life and Prayer
 
by Jane Carol Redmont
 
Friday, May 20, 2005

The Witness

Lectionary Reflections for Trinity Sunday (A)

 

Readings for Trinity Sunday, Year A, May 22, 2005

• Genesis 1:1 - 2:4a
• Psalm 8 (or Psalm 150)
• 2 Corinthians 13:11-13
• Matthew 28:16-20

 
Most of the preachers I know think of Trinity Sunday as Preacher's Nightmare Day. How to keep the sermon from degenerating into a doctrinal lecture? How to do justice to such a complex and vital doctrine in twelve minutes -- or even twenty? What is the connection with the scriptures? Why is the doctrine celebrating God's dynamic and relational self so easy to freeze or to ossify? What has the Trinity to do with the sufferings of our world? And where does any of this leave, lead, or involve the people of God, the true celebrants of this feast? (Preachers are only there to help open a few windows.)

Dorothee Soelle, the German theologian, poet, activist and mystic who died just two years ago, often wrote of how difficult she found it to speak about God.

Equally often, she quoted the medieval mystic Meister Eckhart's saying that God is "that which is most communicable."

This day's feast reminds me of both her statements.

It reminds me also that Soelle once wrote "We can only speak about God when we speak to God."

	It matters how we understand the ecology of God. We need the insights of icons and books, of ecofeminist and Orthodox Christians, of scientists in dialogue with theologians and ethicists.

These words are one of our windows for the day: one of the major paths to understanding the mystery of the Holy Trinity goes through prayer.

I say this not to avoid doctrinal discussion (well, perhaps just a little) since our understandings and formulations of God do matter. They matter to us as a Christian community, and perhaps more importantly, they matter to the broken world in which we live and to its healing. It is interesting (and, I think, no accident) that in recent ecumenical conversations, in fresh theological reflection in both Eastern and Western Christian traditions, and in the work of ecofeminist theologians from the North and the South (Ivone Gebara of Brazil comes first to mind) a renewed understanding of God as Trinity has gone hand in hand with increased attention to God's creation: attention to the environment, to the interdependence of earth, waters, skies and the sentient creatures who dwell there, attention to the impact upon them of human decisions, institutions, and societies. It matters how we understand the ecology of God.

We need the insights of icons and books, of ecofeminist and Orthodox Christians, of scientists in dialogue with theologians and ethicists. And nothing can replace the time that this kind of reflection requires nor our commitment to this mindful exploration.

But at some point, sooner rather than later, we need to hear and speak the poetry of God's mystery. And we will need, at some point, to do so in the second person, "you," speaking to God.

The feast of the Trinity is the gate through which we pass into the long season of the Spirit-filled year. God is alive. God is present. We have just spent the season of Easter remembering and proclaiming this reality, and at Pentecost last week we prayed it with particular intensity, remembering the multiplicity of human experience. Let not the celebration of Trinity, in its honoring of speech about God, lose its speech to God.

So to God we turn, today, even if we see only fragments, or through a glass darkly.

When God is "you," we can plead, argue, listen, fall silent. We can praise or lament. And we can gaze -- at creation in nature, at icons, at the faces of those we love and those we do not love enough.

This contemplation is not of and for the few. The Holy One who is also Multiplicity, and who remains One, is "that which is most communicable." We are not, with this God into whose life Jesus has invited us, in the domain of the spiritually privileged. "We are all mystics," Soelle reminds us.

Take the risk of speaking to God, of approaching or letting yourself be approached, in the boldness of the Spirit and the terror of these times. Alone, or, as this Sunday, in a praying community. In song, in silence, in poetry, in gesture.

Take the risk of speaking to God, of approaching or letting yourself be approached, in the boldness of the Spirit and the terror of these times. Alone, or, as this Sunday, in a praying community. In song, in silence, in poetry, in gesture.

Amos Wilder, the biblical scholar (brother of Thornton Wilder, the playwright and novelist) wrote nearly thirty years ago:

It is at the level of the imagination that the fateful issues of our new world-experience must first be mastered. It is here that culture and history are broken, and here that the church is polarized. Old words do not reach across the new gulfs, and it is only in vision and oracle that we can chart the unknown and new-name the creatures.
Before the message there must be the visions, before the sermon the hymn, before the prose the poem.

The scriptures today do not offer us a formula. They offer us vision, imagination, paths into Trinitarian life and prayer.

"Hallelujah! Praise God with timbrel and dance and strings and pipe." Hear and read and sing the Psalm. Hear it anew. ["Praise God and Dance" from Duke Ellington's Second Sacred Concert, which premiered at New York's Cathedral of St. John the Divine in 1968, is a setting of Psalm 150.] Engage in that praise, directly, with cymbals and trumpet and and voice.

Today's Epistle is doubtless in the lectionary because it is one of the few places in which an explicitly Trinitarian greeting appears. But notice other words from this letter to the church at Corinth. "Do you not realize that Christ is in you?" "Do what is right." "Live in peace." What invitations come with the Trinitarian blessing?

Read and hear the words from Genesis both dramatically and reverently: stars, sky, earth, swarms of living creatures, waters of the sea, fish and human creatures, and -- hear, O busy, overscheduled ones -- God's sabbath rest, and the earth's, and ours. What response will we give to this when we go forth into all the nations?

Pray the feast. Let the feast live in the people of God.

Soelle in Summer: a course-retreat. We're on!

Remember the question I asked here?

Well, we're on!

Soelle in Summer: Challenge and Wonder

 an online course-retreat

 June 17-July 31, 2013

Read and reflect in community on the work, thought, and spirituality of Dorothee Soelle (also spelled Sölle). 

Soelle (1928-2003) was a German theologian, poet, peace activist, and Protestant Christian with Catholic, secular, humanist, and Jewish companions and allies; she was also a friend, teacher, spouse, mother, socialist, and from mid-life on, feminist.

  
Details of the course-retreat are here.

Soelle in Summer is designed, led, and facilitated by Jane Redmont (theologian, author, spiritual director). Seven weeks, $245. Write readwithredmont@earthlink.net. Registrations welcome till Tuesday, June 18. 

Interested in Dorothee Soelle? A summer online retreat/course opportunity

I don't as they put it believe in god

but to him I cannot say no hard as I try
take a look at him in the garden
when his friends ran out on him
his face wet with fear
and with the spit of his enemies
him I have to believe

Him I can't bear to abandon
to the great disregard for life
to the monotonous passing of millions of years
to the moronic rhythm of work leisure and work
to the boredom we fail to dispel
in cars in beds in stores

That's how it is they say what do you want
uncertain and not uncritically
I subscribe to the other hypothesis
which is his story
that's not how it is he said for god is
and he staked his life on this claim

Thinking about it I find
one can't let him pay alone
for his hypothesis
so I believe him about
god

The way one believes another's laughter
his tears
or marriage or no for an answer
that's how you'll learn to believe him about life
promised to all

A poem I had posted here many moons ago. It is from the series of 10 poems "When He Came" in Dorothee Soelle's book Revolutionary Patience (1977).
 
"SOELLE IN SUMMER" - *online* June 17-July 31. A mix of retreat and course, with opportunity for both individual reflection and conversation. Interested? Read more on my web space here.

Liturgy & spirituality in feminist perspective: online course

As I noted in the previous post, which announced the Merton retreat, I have begun (since last year) to offer online courses and retreats.

We have a course about to start in a week. It is called Naming Mystery, Living Justice: Spirituality and Liturgy in Feminist Perspective. It will feature Christian feminist as well as some Jewish feminist and Goddess/Pagan readings. Full information is here. 

All genders are welcome. You don't have to be a woman to be interested in feminism.

Note that there is a discount if you register by tonight! (Sunday, January 20.) If you don't read this till Monday morning, ask for the discount then too. 

The home page of my professional website (really a blog acting like a website) is here.

Now back to our (ir)regularly scheduled blogging...

Ethics, anyone?

An excellent resource for both religious and not-so-religious folks in many fields of endeavor, world-wide: Globethics.com, the Global Ethics Network for Applied Ethics. Have a look!


What the network says about itself (from the website):

The aim of Globethics.net is to ensure that people in all regions of the world are empowered to reflect and act on ethical issues. In order to ensure access to knowledge resources in applied ethics, Globethics.net has developed its Globethics.net Library, the leading global digital library on ethics. Globethics.net took this initiative to ensure that persons - especially in Africa, Asia and Latin-America - have access to good quality and up to date knowledge resources. The founding conviction of Globethics.net was that more equal access to knowledge resources in the field of applied ethics will enable persons and institutions from developing and transition economies to become more visible and audible in the global discourse on ethics. There is no cost involved in using the library. Individuals only need to register (free of charge) as participants on the Globethics.net website (www.globethics.net) to get access to all the full text journals, encyclopedias, e-books and other resources in the library.

In addition to the library, Globethics.net also offers participants on its website the opportunity to join or form electronic working groups for purposes of networking or collaborative research. The international secretariat, based in Geneva, currently concentrates on three topics of research: Business and Economic Ethics, Methodologies of Interreligious Ethics and Responsible Leadership. The knowledge produced through the working groups and research finds their way into publications that are also made available in the Globethics.net Library. One of the latest fruits of such collaborative work is the book, Overcoming Fundamentalism (edited by Christoph Stückelberger and Heidi Hadsell, 2009, Geneva: Globethics.net).

I joined initially because of my interest in the Global Digital Library on Theology and Ecumenism (online theological resources for education and ecumenical dialogue) which is housed at Globethics.net and which you can find here.

Feast of Ignatius of Loyola

Happy Feast of Ignatius of Loyola! This is a link to a [2007] blog post about Ignatius, his feast, his rooms in Rome (which I had the joy of visiting), some new statues, the Infanta Juana, and related topics. I just fixed about half a dozen broken links, so everything should work.

This comes with deep gratitude to the worldwide Ignatian community.

Cross-posted on Facebook.

This Fragile Earth, Our Island Home: An Ecological Spirituality of Lament and Hope

There's still room!

This Fragile Earth, Our Island Home:

An Ecological Spirituality of Lament and Hope

a weekend retreat-conference

led by Jane Carol Redmont

at Adelynrood Retreat and Conference Center

Byfield, Massachusetts

Friday, August 5 - Sunday, August 7, 2011

Spirituality is not only prayer, but practice. It is the way we walk on the earth, work together, build community, honor our bodies and those of others, celebrate and struggle, and listen to the promptings of the Spirit.

Today’s environmental realities call us to examine anew how we live on this fragile planet as people of faith.

In addition to short lectures, our conference will include time for meditation, prayer, sharing of resources, and personal and group reflection.

We will focus especially on the themes of lament and hope, which will be woven throughout our times of prayer.

We will leave nourished by the insights of theologians –mostly women— from several continents and more deeply aware of Earth’s body, our bodies, and the Body of Christ.

The theologians include Dorothee Soelle, Mercy Amba Oduyoye, Rosemary Radford Ruether, and Ivone Gebara.

Registration information here. Some scholarships are available.

Thirty Years: An AIDS Anniversary

Thirty years ago today, on June 5, 1981, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported the first cases of AIDS in the United States.

My friend Wormwood's Doxy, an HIV/AIDS education professional, has written a moving anniversary essay at her blog. Read it here.

Once you have recovered from reading it --it may take you a few hours; it is an intense and beautiful essay-- come back here and read my offering for this day, written 23 years ago, in 1988, when I was in my thirties.

This commentary, minus the three paragraphs in red brackets, was published and distributed by Religious News Service (now called Religion News Service) on July 12, 1988 under the title "The Names Project Quilt Makes Beauty Out of Horror."

At the time I wrote the essay, I was working on my first book, Generous Lives: American Catholic Women Today (William Morrow, 1992; pbk Triumph/Liguori 1993), and was employed as a program developer raising funds for The Hospice at Mission Hill, the first residential hospice for people with AIDS in Boston.

The AIDS Quilt was on its first major tour around the U.S. and was displayed in its entirety on the National Mall in Washington, DC in fall of that year. I went to see it at what was still called the Boston Armory.

I have altered only a few tiny grammar and style details and have left in the language I used back then, only seven years after the anniversary we commemorate today. (For instance, I never use "minority groups" or "minorities" to mean people of color or minoritized groups these days, but I did then. The Soviet Union was still the Soviet Union in 1988, so I left that in. What is now the U.S. Postal Service had another name.)

The pandemic is still with us, all over the world. This essay is a slice of life.

Many of the students I teach were not even born when I wrote these words.

The Quilt

Cambridge, Massachusetts
June 23, 1988

In Stockholm last week, medical researchers from around the world tracked the elusive virus and its deadly mysteries. In Boston a massive quilt unfolded for four days, stitched by thousands of Americans as a memorial to people who have died of ADS. The quilt, sponsored by the Names Project, is as different from other memorials to the dead as AIDS is different from the other diseases that have plagued us. It is not made of stone and anchored in the ground, but portable and soft, organic, making its way around the nation, still growing.

More than a week after my visit to the Quilt, its impact will not go away. The first emotional shock, for visitors, is the sheer magnitude and diversity of the project, row upon row of remembered lives, presented in sophisticated patterns and hesitant stitches, in all materials from denim to organza. Some panels show only a name and dates of birth and death. Others literally bear pieces of people's lives: articles of clothing, photographs, locks of hair. One has the ashes of the person it commemorates sewn into a corner.

The Names Project is meant, according to its founder, San Francisco gay activist Cleve Jones, to give "a glimpse of the lives behind the statistics" as it travels around the country. Men, women and children sewed for relatives and lovers and for people they had never met. There are crosses and stars of David, hearts and teddy bears and pictures of cats, insignia representing the military and the medical professions, pennants from Yale and Columbia. On one panel is the portrait of a proud, handsome Black man, with a written tribute to his character and commitments. Another, with a child's pink dress sewn onto it, says only "La Hijita de Dios," "the little daughter of God." All over the panel, serving as background design, are small diaper pins.

And then there is the second shock: youth. Over half the panels bear dates of birth and death. I stared and subtracted: twenty-five years old; thirty-nine; twenty-two; two years old. The overwhelming majority of those who have died, who are now ill, who are HIV-positive, are young. Mothers embroider love letters to lost sons on the cloth. Nothing prepares one for this, even the experience (which I share) of having young loved ones among the dead. It is like walking in an old New England cemetery and coming across a child's stone marker among the graves.

We speak a lot these days about the spread of AIDS among intravenous drug users, among heterosexuals, into minority communities, through mothers to their babies. The Quilt is beginning to show the impact of these facts. But still the names are mostly those of men --young men, gay men. I am reminded of the population charts in the Soviet Union, on which the curve dips at the males who were young adults during World War II. We have not even begun to measure the trauma and devastation which AIDS has brought to an entire generation of an entire community. "I am angry," says a friend, "that at the age of 29 I must deal constantly with multiple deaths, with friends losing their strength and the use of their bodies, with grief and hospitals and burials and loss. " "Many of us are finding it hard to plan for the future," says another: "Is there a future for me? Will my closest friends till be here in five years? Will I?"

I think of the shock after the death of a single loved one, how it leaves one numb and split open all at once, with the feeling of being both wrapped in cotton wool and bled raw. Multiply this by six and twelve and fifty in the life of one person; multiply that by hundreds. Only after doing this can one measure the emotional impact of AIDS, the massive grief of whole communities, spreading around the nation.

"Wrenching" and "healing" --in the same sentence-- are the words I have heard and used most often to describe the Names Project. This witness to multiple deaths is also about the fullness of life. Most of the panels remember people not as they were in their last days, weighting eighty pounds and unable to bathe themselves or walk to the toilet, but as they were in life, designing theatre sets and playing ball, lovers of glitz and glitter or of hikes in the mountains, speaking and singing in Spanish and English, eating and drinking. A panel dedicated to a mail carrier features the arm of his blue uniform with the "U.S. Mail" emblem, cradling a small teddy bear. The rest of the panel is an uproarious burst of color: a golden peacock, a sunflower, cloth letters of a name in rainbow colors, pictures of California life.

Still, for some of the survivors, the colors battle against bleak memories. "I can no longer remember him healthy and live," says a woman I know of the friend for whom she made a panel. "I always remember him the other way."

All the panels tug at the heart. But for each visitor there were a few that hit the core and that linger, triggering floods of anger, grief, or tenderness. For me one of these was the pink "Hijita de Dios." Another featured two men's shirts sewn on with their arms entwined. "Though lovers shall be lost love shall not," Dylan Thomas wrote in "And Death Shall Have No Dominion." The first verse of this poem is printed on the third Quilt panel that lives on inside me. Long before AIDS, before the wasted bodies and lost minds, before the dementia, Thomas wrote:

"Though they go mad they shall be sane
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again."

"Death shall have no dominion." I cannot shake this phrase from my mind, trying to summon the stubbornness of life against the slow creep of death.

[The Vietnam Memorial changed forever our experience of monuments to the dead. Like the Vietnam Memorial, the Quilt is a live place, no lonely obelisk in the town square but a place of meeting and community. The Vietnam monument grows bits of life; the first day I went, on a wet December morning, a small flag with a spring of heather tied to it was propped up against the wall almost lost in the mud and brown oak leaves. The rain cause the black wall to shine and reflect my face back to me. There were names on my reflection, some of them familiar last names. The people I knew who bore these names were still alive; but I began to wonder. Was this a relative of the person I knew? Could it have been my friend, given a different lottery number, another set of circumstances? The boundaries crumbled. There was no barrier left between "them" and "us."

The Names Project takes this kind of memorial experience further, deeper. At the Vietnam Memorial, people talk, embrace, weep, ask questions. The dark stone brings forth stories because of the power of the names. The Quilt itself tells the stories, spells out the memories in material that almost seems made of flesh. It is also an organic reality: a whole piece of art, but an unfinished one. The epidemic has not stopped growing. Neither, until it does, will this quilt.

It is impossible to stay passive before the Quilt, even more so than before the Vietnam Memorial. This is because it tells stories directly and because live stories lead us to act and to hope, like the retelling of the Passover or the account of Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad. Memories like these do not mire us in the past; they move us to shape the future. But first we go down, into the grief, into the struggle, through the retelling. Without memory, there is no possibility of hope, nor of bringing about the changes that will stem the tide of death.]

As I walked into the exhibit, the first people I saw were a very pregnant woman, a man, and a child. The mother bent over and spoke to her child about a man who had "died of the bad disease." She asked the child, pointing to a panel with a basketball shirt attached and an embroidered basketball, "What do you think this person really liked?" Five years from now, will I be the woman explaining to her child about the bad disease? Fifteen years from now, will this disease still claim lives? Will the Quilt sit in a museum? How many more stories will we need to tell? "No more names!" read a tee-shirt worn by one of the visitors.

The Quilt is a wondrous work of art --colorful, homespun, soft and resilient, quintessentially American, spiritual and political, beautiful in itself and charged with moral energy. It chronicles a catastrophe, like Picasso' s "Guernica," but is crafted by a community rather than a lone genius. Like "Guernica," it makes beauty out of horror. It leaves the viewer torn: grateful for such beauty, for the redeeming power of names and memory, for the healing; and wishing that this thing of beauty had never had to exist, knowing the names will not go away.

* * * * * * * *

This was, of course, long before the internet. The Quilt is now online here. Nothing, however, replaces having seen it, walked around the panels, bumped into a colleague who wept in my arms, and heard the names of the dead read aloud, as has happened at all public showings of this work of art.

Beth Johnson, reliable guide

Many of you have doubtless heard about the brouhaha about Elizabeth Johnson, Distinguished Professor of Theology at Fordham University, whose book Quest for the Living God was criticized, yea even condemned by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' Committee on Doctrine in late March. If you have not heard about the controversy, all the more reason to read the article linked below and links embedded in it.

Prof. Deirdre Good (who blogs at On Not Being a Sausage) and I have written an essay on Prof. Johnson, her theology, and the controversy. The article just came out today (Easter Monday, April 25) at the Episcopal Café. Have a look here (permanent link, will stay up even when article is no longer on the front page) and please feel welcome to leave a comment at the Café below the article.

Merton (born on this day in 1915) on the work of peace compared to the work of war

"If this task of building a peaceful world is the most important task of our time, it is also the most difficult. It will, in fact, require far more discipline, more sacrifice, more planning, more thought, more cooperation and more heroism than war ever demanded."

-Thomas Merton, who was born on this day in 1915
(died Dec. 10, 1968)

Cross-posted on Facebook.

To those for whom the New Year is difficult

Special warm wishes to those for whom New Year's Eve and Day are difficult. May you discover hope and consolation in the struggle; may regret and resentment melt away as time goes by; may peace of mind and heart and body visit you and dwell in you; if grief is your companion, may its company be gentle; if you are in recovery from addiction, may you find strength to persevere; may you know true friendship, human and divine.


I just posted these words on Facebook. I have decided there is nothing wrong with duplicating posts here.

Photo: Jane Redmont

December 28: Feast of the Holy Innocents

A.k.a. Childermas to you high-church C of E types.


In addition to the best-known paintings of the Massacre of the Innocents by Giotto di Bondone (above) and Pieter Brueg[h]el the Elder (below), I am posting some other depictions of the killing of the innocents. But first, a biblical reminder.

When the wise men had departed, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, "Get up, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt, and remain there until I tell you; for Herod is about to search for the child, to destroy him." Then Joseph got up, took the child and his mother by night, and went to Egypt, and remained there until the death of Herod. This was to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet, "Out of Egypt I have called my son."

When Herod saw that he had been tricked by the wise men, he was infuriated, and he sent and killed all the children in and around Bethlehem who were two years old or under, according to the time that he had learned from the wise men. Then was fulfilled what had been spoken through the prophet Jeremiah:

"A voice was heard in Ramah,

wailing and loud lamentation,

Rachel weeping for her children;

she refused to be consoled, because they are no more."

Matthew 2:13-18

Fra Angelico


Matteo di Giovanni

Giovanni Pisano

Why the attraction of the subject matter? The drama of course; the sheer injustice; the terror; the worst loss a mother can ever endure: the killing of her child -- multiplied by the hundreds and thousands. Mary and Joseph save their baby from death, but later Mary will endure the loss of her son as an adult and be helpless to protect him, as are the mothers in this scene. As are so many mothers.

In last year's December 28 post, I posted pictures of children much closer to our time as well as information about agencies helping children. Remember them. Care for the vulnerable. Holy Innocents, pray for us, and in your blood and the suffering of your mothers remind us to prevent more pain, more deaths, more tears, and to weep in solidarity with those who mourn. In Christ's name, Amen.


Giovanni Pisano, Pistoia Pulpit, detail

Click on photo to enlarge and see detail.

September 11, 2010: reflection for a student-initiated "interfaith solidarity" gathering

In light of recent events and less recent ones, some students at Guilford College, where I teach, organized a gathering for reflection and meditation. The event was simple and included readings from Jewish, Christian, and Muslim holy scriptures followed by Quaker-style silence with opportunity for anyone to speak. It began with a spoken reflection by a faculty member, who happened to be your friendly Acts of Hope blogger.

Here is the reflection. Bear in mind that

1) it was addressed to a particular audience --in this case, mostly "adult-escent" students and one or two faculty, including a variety of religious, non-religious, I'm-not-religious-but-I'm-spiritual, and other folks, so "pitching it" was tricky;

2) it has some repetitions and will seem a little rambling in places, with questionable sentence structure. I wrote it to be spoken aloud, slowly and somewhat meditatively.

In spite of this, perhaps some of this reflection will be useful to you.

As you may surmise from the words below, I've been teaching Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Dorothee Soelle, Diana Eck, and Eboo Patel these days. And the early centuries of the Christian church.

Shalom. Salaam aleikum. Peace be with you.

Reflections on Interreligious Solidarity
Today and in the Long Haul

We welcome each other to this gathering
to which we come in peace
with both our common humanity
and our profound differences.

I always smile and take a deep breath
when someone says to me
“Well, all religions are the same.”
Actually, they are not.

Our gathering today
is an invitation to open our hearts and minds
and (as Thomas said in his invitation letter) our arms
to those who are
not us.

To learn:
Allah is worshipped by Muslims,
as all-merciful and compassionate.

To learn:
There was a Muslim nonviolent leader
Kahn Abdul Ghaffar Khan (known as Badshah Khan)
in what is now Pakistan
in the same era as the Hindu nonviolent leader
Mohandas Gandhi
(known as Mahatma Gandhi).

To learn:
Jewish law is not a set of rules
but a path of life.

To learn:
The Torah and the whole Tanakh
and Judaism
are not just a prelude to Christianity.

To learn:
Jesus was not a Christian.

To learn:
Orthodox Christians who venerate icons
of Jesus, Mary, and the saints
are not worshiping idols.

To learn:
There have been times and places in history
in which Jews, Christians, and Muslims
have killed in the name of God.

To learn:
There have been times and places in history
in which Jews, Christians, and Muslims
have lived together and learned from each other.
Cordoba. Sarajevo. New York.

To learn:
Muslims worshiped peacefully
on the 17th floor of the World Trade Center
and were among the dead 9 years ago
along with Christians, Jews, Buddhists,
humanists, agnostics, atheists, and
many people whose faith we will never know.

To learn:
On that day,
an openly gay Franciscan Catholic priest
was one of the people who died
not because he was working in the twin towers
but because he rushed over there
and went in
to help care for and pray for
the wounded and the dead.

To learn:
Long before 2001,
September the 11th was the day in 1973
that a coalition of military generals
toppled the democratically elected government in Chile
and established a dictatorship that ruled with terror
for 16 years, banned trade unions,
exiled 200,000 dissenters
killed thousands of others,
and used its laws against a million native people,
the Mapuche.
The U.S. government, except during the Carter era,
supported the dictatorship.

Now,
having said all this,
let me make something clear.

Knowledge alone will not save or heal the world.
Higher learning will not guarantee justice
or alone teach compassion.

That would be to say
that only educated people can be holy
and that all educated people are righteous.

That is not true.

The Nazi doctors had lots of education.
They had medical degrees
from distinguished universities
and they used their knowledge
to torture and kill other human beings
both children and adults.
And then they went home
and listened to classical music.

Education is important
and truth and accuracy do matter.

but I want to raise the question for us today
of what kind of education we need.

More specifically,
I want to ask
what practices
–I’d like to call them spiritual practices
and I hope this is a phrase that has meaning
to all or most of you—
I want to ask what spiritual practices
we need to cultivate
in order to live as compassionate neighbors
in this conflicted world.

The world in which we live
is dangerous as well as beautiful.

The hate which we have witnessed in so many ways
--poverty that kills,
violence that kills,
cultural violence,
the threat of burning scriptures, the Qur’an, in Florida,
the burning of bodies in New York and Washington (and Pennsylvania),
the bodies maimed and raped and murdered in wars
right now
in so many countries,
the hasty language in the comments on news websites,
the swastika that showed up on someone's door
in Binford dorm the other day, right here on campus—
all that hate is not going to go away.

The hate is not going away,
though the good news is that there are
many people and groups
from many religions and places and cultures
who do the work of love,
who embody solidarity,
who exercise humility and who labor for justice.

In this world
you will be asked to stand up
for the same values and sentiments
for which you stand today
here in this circle.

You will need to do so
in hostile environments.

Will you be ready?

How will you prepare yourself?

How are you preparing now, while you are in school,
for the kind of witness we give today?

On what (or on whom)
will you draw to help you?

Let me use a word
that will not have a benevolent meaning
to all of you;
it is the word "tradition."
Thank you for bearing with me.

What tradition
or traditions
will you drawn on?

You see, we have company here.

We have company in the way of peace:
in religious peacemaking
and in secular groups devoted to peace.

We have to forge new paths
but we do not have to reinvent the wheel.

People have been here before us.

This is part of today’s good news.
We are not alone, here in our little group.

Both the dead and the living
walk with us and teach us and encourage us
if we will only listen.

We can’t do this work
without community.

And we are not the first.

Our particular community
may be a community of faith and practice,
or a humanist community.
Our communities may be
communities of struggle,
communities of peacemakers,
long established
or fairly new groups
(like the Interfaith Youth Core).


Some of us here
believe that our way
and our community’s way
is the best and the holiest.

Others
are not sure what we believe
or where the way is for us.

Whether we are one or the other
or somewhere in between,
encountering the other
is part of our work in the classroom.

It is also our work everywhere else.
Everywhere.

Think of how often
you –let me say “we” here
since of course I do it too.
Think how often we
respond hastily,
inwardly or outwardly,
jump to conclusions,
think first of our own good.

Especially those of us who are privileged
by virtue of our education,
our race, our gender,
and yes, our religion,
if we are members of the majority religion.

Others
are our teachers.

The poor and the uneducated will teach you.

The one you fear will teach you.

Your own fear will teach you.

We have to school ourselves
for solidarity.

It is hard for all of us.

Those of us who are older,
who have some experience and perhaps some wisdom
can lock ourselves inside that experience
and wall off new insight.
We need to remember that wisdom will come
from those half our age
and from territory
where we have not ventured
over the years
out of fear
or habit
or laziness.

Those of us who are younger
who are still figuring out who we are,
building our egos,
shoring them up,
and in the process resisting and reacting,
which is good and part of the journey,
may find out we need to ease up
to let wisdom in.


Solidarity:
this will cost you.
This will cost us.

Wherever we draw our inspiration and our strength,
whatever our primary community,
of faith
or blood
or friendship
there will be a cost.

So again,
ask yourselves:

Given the state of the world,
given the misunderstanding, the bias, the hatred,
and given the hope and vision that others
here and elsewhere
have shared with me,
how will I spend these college years?

I urge you,
spend these years equipping yourselves.

And do remind us who teach
that we need to equip ourselves
and school ourselves as well
for the path of peace.

Solidarity is not just today.

Solidarity is a long road.

Learning about each other takes time.

The Torah and the rest of the Tanakh,
the Christian Bible,
the Holy Qur’an:
the riches in them,
the commentaries on them
the disagreements about them
take years to study.

The traditions of the children of Abraham
take years to understand.

So do the traditions of the children of Sarah,
of Hajar (her Muslim name – Jews and Christians call her Hagar),
of Mary, who is also Mariam and Miriam.

Some traditions are written, others not.
They are also part of our collective story
and may take even more discernment and insight
to learn and understand.

Can we take the time for this?

Can we learn
not to make assumptions
about why someone covers her head with a scarf?
Can we learn not to make fun of people
who live by a different calendar from ours
or won’t do business one day a week?
Or of people who lay a mat on the floor to pray
or fall into the joyous ecstasy of Pentecostal Christian worship
or use images in prayer?

Can we learn not to make haste?

How do we learn to discern
when to choose holy patience
and when to choose holy impatience?

How do we learn to listen?

All this requires practice.

Daily.

More than daily.

Zen Buddhists would call some of this
the practice of mindfulness.

How do we take a breath
and not rush to reaction?

Can we learn
what gives the other person sorrow
but also what gives this person joy?

Can we try to understand
the whole person before us?

Will we also learn to understand systems and communities?

Can we acquire understanding of how
the many media and modes of communication
work
and of how they shape our perceptions?

Can we learn to understand
our own emotions and reactions?

We can’t do this alone.

We can’t do this without community.

It starts right here.

Holocaust map - Europe and the teaching of 20th century theology

The link to this map doesn't work, but I saved the image as a jpg.

I am linking a Facebook post to this since the link is cranky and refuses to show up on Facebook.

Make sure you click on the image to enlarge it. (Click twice and it will get really big and detailed.)

Post on Facebook:

Map for the little darlings to study. Yeah, I'm teaching a Christian theology course and they are also getting a good dose of theological vocabulary & questions. But woe unto those who study European theologies in the mid-20th century & after without looking this in the face. And without asking whether & how this affects the questions & the language. And how we understand God. And how theology & ethics are related. And what responsibilities Christians bear.

End of speech. I'm off to edit the Tome.

An Open Letter to Anne Rice

My open letter to Anne Rice, an essay on the church, its flaws, and why you can't be a Jesus-person alone in a corner, is up at the Episcopal Café.

Feel free to circulate prn.

Cross-posted on Facebook.

A brilliant new book: geeks and prayer types please note

A Californian acquaintance of mine by the name of Sistertech has written a truly brilliant, not to mention humorous and touching, book of prayers.

Sistertech transmits her spiritual writings via my friend Pamela Hood, Ph.D., a professor of philosophy in San Francisco, and I recently received a copy of this Book of Uncommon Prayer. Here are a few samples from it.


1.1 Prayers for Morning

1.1.1
May The One in Charge bless us this day, keep us from evil viruses, and bring us stable wireless connectivity. Amen.

1.1.4
Dear One In Charge,
You have brought us in safety to this new day:
Preserve us and our tech devices
with your mighty power,
that we may not fall into sin,
or be overcome by phishing scams, spyware, viruses,
or other adversities;
and in all we do, direct us to the fulfilling of your purpose.
Amen.

1.1.5
A Morning Psalm for Social Media Users
Open my _____ (state name of social media program or website),
O One in Charge,
and my tweets shall proclaim your praise.
Create in me a clean cache
and renew a right spirit of updating within me.
Cast me not away from my Twitter stream,
take not your holy inspiration from me.
Give me the joy of sending tweets again.
Sustain me with bountiful followers
and plenty of content to retweet.
Amen.

1.4 Prayers for Sleep

1.4.1.
O One In Charge,
while our bodies and computers rest
from the labors of the day
and as our RAM, caches, and our souls are released
from the thoughts of this world,
grant that we may stand in your presence
with tranquility, quietness, and peace.
Amen.

1.5 Prayers Before and After Meals

1.5.5.
O One in Charge,
bless this caffeine to our use
and us to thy service.
Amen.

1.5.6
Bless the bunch that munch
this lunch.
Amen.

1.5.7.
O One in Charge, Giver of all good things,
may this food and drink restore our strength,
giving new energy to tired limbs,
and new thoughts to weary minds.
Amen.

2.0 Traditional Prayers (Fran, you will love this one)

2.2. Hail Holy External Drive

Hail, holy two terabyte storage drive,
mother of mercy,
Hail keeper of our life's work,
our sweetest digital files,
and our hope of promotion.

To thee do we cry,
poor banished children of incessant computer crashes;
to these do we send up our sighs,
mourning and weeping
in this valley of infected and corrupted files.

Turn, then, most gracious defender,
thine eyes of mercy toward us;
and after this, our exile,
show unto us the blessed repository of our files:

O clement, O loving, O sweet
terabyte drive.

Pray for us, O perfect external drive,
that we may be made worthy of thy promises of safety.
Amen.

There are prayers to various appropriate saints as well.

There is also a wonderful rendition of the Prayer of Saint Francis, but I will not reproduce it here. You'll have to buy the book!

4.0 The Collects

4.6.2.
For Those Who Offer Technical Support

O One In Charge,
we pray that your grace may always precede and follow
those who offer technical support on their service calls.
May they continually do good work
and not make matters worse.
Amen.

Under 5.4, Ministration to the Sick, there are prayers for sick computers, for the restoration of a hard drive, for computer repair personnel, and so on.

There are also Various & Sundry General Prayers & Thanksgivings including a System Administrator's Prayer for Wellbeing and a prayer For Victims of Gaming Addiction and, of course, For Tech Devices We Love.

I particularly like the Reconciliation of a Penitent, which includes the following:

Penitent:
I confess to The One In Charge,
to geeks everywhere, and to you,
that I have sinned by my own fault
in thought, word, and deed, in things done and left undone;
especially for
__________
__________
__________
__________
___________

(attach digital file if more space is needed.)

For these and all other transgressions which I cannot now remember,
I am truly sorry.
I pray The One In Charge to have mercy on me.
I firmly intend to get a grip,
wake up,
and smell the coffee,
and I humbly beg forgiveness of The One in Charge
and all tech devices,
and I ask you for counsel, direction, and absolution.

Here the witness may offer the penitent counsel, comfort, absolution or a hard time.

Witness:
Chill out.
Everything's copacetic.
The One In Charge has deleted all your sins.

Penitent:
Whew! Thank God!

And just in case one of your machines has a birthday today...

6.11 For a Birthday of a Tech Device
Watch over this device, O One In Charge,
as its days increase;
bless and guide it wherever it may be.
Strengthen it where it is turned on;
comfort it when it receives error messages;
raise it up if it is dropped;
and in its memory
may thy peace which passeth understanding
abide
all the days of its life.
Amen.

And there are, of course, Sistertech's Ten Commandments. Do not drink coffee while reading them. Especially when you read the Sixth Commandment:

"Thou shalt not kill thy laptop by spilling within it half-caf/half-decaf, 2%, extra tall, double mochas or any other fluids."

The Sabbath-keeping and no-adultery commandments are good, too.

The Faith FAQ is terrific.

Now this is a book that "prays well."

The book is on sale at 15% discount till August 15 and it is also available as an e-book in pdf form if you prefer.

I know I've posted two pieces of book p.r. in a row, but it's summer, a good time for reading. You will also need this tech-y prayer book when fall comes along, or long before that if you have anything to do with a computer. Yes, you.

Postcript to the Adorable Godson: Don't you dare buy this: I'm sending you one as a new-tech-job present.