PeaceBang

PeaceBang E-Mail Techno Problems

Hi Friends,

I just wanted to let you know that I DO answer my mail from blog readers, but for some reason that e-mail has been going not to you but to an Outgoing Mail folder that I just found tonight.

There I was thinking, “Gee, I haven’t heard from J. and S. and that nice person from Los Angeles and some other people. I guess everyone’s at their Maine cabin or something. I wonder if Lori and Suzanne want to get together in New York to work on their book or not.”

I don’t know what the glitch is, but I’m glad to have found the many letters.

Please forgive the perceived rudeness. I love your letters and I will do my best to fix the problem.

Gone Fishin’

Well, you prolific and provocative little commenting maniacs, I’m sorry I won’t be posting this week as I will be attending a colloquy on evil and suffering down on Cape Cod. You know, just a li’l light subject for our warm July days. Theodicy and fried clams. Like that.

Our keynote is David Bentley Hart, the theologian who wrote The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God In The Tsunami? It’s a well-regarded book, but so far (fifty pages in) it seems as though Dr. Hart is more invested in insisting that all the other theologians who tackled the question at the time have it all wrong than in illustrating why he has it right. That’s one problem. I’m itching to get to the big argument. I’m turning pages and saying, “BRING it, David!” The other problem is my question about whether it’s ethical for Christian theologians to impose a Christian theodicy on an event that affected a mostly non-Christian population.

I dunno, it strikes me as kind of … colonialist. You can beat me about the head with a flour sock for being too PC, but dern it, I can’t help but keep returning to that question. Hart doesn’t make any real effort to locate his own cultural context, just plows in with both guns loaded, shooting down all the lame explanations “everyone else” has about how a loving and omnipotent God could allow such a catastrophe. I’m thinking, but hey, brilliant white Christian professor who speaks eleven languages, what happens if your explanation does further harm or injury to the victims of the tsunami? Should we care about this possibility?

I wonder if God cares? My Unitarian Universalism is showing here: I actually believe that the diversity of religious beliefs (and non-belief) all over our lovely planet are very much part of the divine plan.

Will this come up later in the book? Mebbe. But I doubt it.

Of course I won’t breathe a word of this at the conference, but that’s what I’m going in with. I’m just disappointed in this book because Hart’s other book The Beauty of the Infinite is breath-taking. To be honest, it’s way over my head with its smatterings of untranslated Greek, Latin, French and German, and super high-falutin’ academese, and I have the feeling it could have been written in a far more accessible way, but it’s still breathtaking.

Meanwhile, I think I just agreed to be the sole caretaker of my two and three-year old nephews for four days and nights in August. Auntie PeaceBang feels so unqualified for this, you have no idea. But this guy does.*

Kiss of peace. xoxo PB

* - I know you saw this already but it still makes me laugh.

The Tale Of The Whale: Mary Oliver’s “Humpbacks”

I am nuts about whales. I think whales are the coolest people on Earth. I am the idiot on the whale watch who starts crying whenever a whale shows up and yells, “I LOVE YOU!” at it.

My mom and I had a ridiculous comedy routine going for a year or two with about a 9″ rubber whale I got at the Chicago Aquarium. After I moved out of the house I shared with my boyfriend in Minnesota and moved in with Mom and her hubby in Rochester, I brought with me the whale that David and I called “The Whay-ale” in long, breathy voices. It’s probably no use trying to explain how hilarious it was the time David and I had a fight and I stormed off to my study and after awhile felt that someone was watching me, and looked up to see The Whay-ale regarding me from the doorway, hanging there in space all by itself, and we laughed and laughed and laughed and the fight melted away. I was so fond of that whale.

So anyway, when that relationship ended and I moved to Mom’s, I put the whale in the bathtub. One morning she went in there to shower and, since she wasn’t wearing her glasses, thought it was maybe a big gray rat in there with her and screamed. I ran to the stairs and heard her laughing like crazy, having apparently realized that it was not a rat but a dumb toy whale.

When I came home late a few nights later and went to use the bathroom, the whale was floating on a foil raft in the toilet. I laughed like hell. When my mother sat down to eat dinner at my sister’s wedding later that summer, the whale rolled out of her napkin and onto her lap. She laughed like hell. When I went on the umpteenth day to the end of the driveway to see if my acceptance letter from Harvard Divinity School had arrived, I found an empty mailbox with nothing in it but the whale looking all jaunty wearing a Christmas ribbon. I laughed like hell. When Mom snuck in to watch part of a dress rehearsal of “Lips Together, Teeth Apart,” I used the whale in lieu of a cordless telephone in the second act. I had alerted my fellow actors about it, and we calmly passed the whale around as the scene required. I heard Mom trying to stifle her laughter from the front row.

We did that for years until the beloved whale got lost in someone’s stolen luggage — I think mine.

I do love whales.

One summer I did a service with the UU Church of Reading, MA that was called “The Moon By Whalelight,” which combined readings from Diane Ackerman’s book of the same name, wonderful improvisational music by a jazz musician, and poetry about whales. The congregation and I went on a whale watch immediately after the service and it was as special a time as I can remember having in the UU community.

That’s just a little background information on why I’m so excited about my date
with my oldest and best childhood buddyroo and her two daughters this coming Sunday.

***

There is, all around us,
this country
of original fire.

You know what I mean.

The sky, after all, stops at nothing so something
has to be holding
our bodies
in its rich and timeless stables or else
we would fly away.

Off Stellwagan
off the Cape,
the humbacks rise. Carrying their tonnage
of barnacles and joy
they leap through the water, they nuzzle back under it
like children
at play.

They sing, too.
And not for any reason
you can’t imagine.

Three of them
rise to the surface near the bow of the boat,
then dive
deeply, their huge scarred flukes
tipped to the air.

We wait, not knowing
just where it will happen; suddenly
they smash thorugh the surface, someone begins
shouting for joy and you realize
it is yourself as they surge
upward and you see for the first time
how huge they are, as they breach,
and dive, and breach again
through the shining blue flowers
of the split water and you see them
for some unbelievable
part of a moment against the sky —
like nothing you’ve ever imagined —
like the myth of the fifth morning galloping
out of darkness, pouring
heavenward, spinning; then

they crash back under those black silks
and we all fall back
together into that wet fire, you
know what I mean.

I know a captain who has seen them
playing with seaweed, swimming
through the green islands, tossing
the slippery branches into the air.

I know a whale that will come to the boat whenever
she can, and nudge it gently along the bow
with her long flipper.

I know several lives worth living.

Listen, whatever it is you try
to do with your life, nothing will ever dazzle you
like the dreams of your body,

its spirit
longing to fly while the dead-weight bones

toss their dark mane and hurry
back into the fields of glittering fire

where everything,
even the great whale,
throbs with song.

-Mary Oliver, Humpbacks

God Is Still Speaking

At a party the other night, I shared my plans to spend my free summer Sundays worshiping at various churches. I said that I’d already spent one Sunday with Episcopalians in Portland and one with Methodists in Seattle. The room full of liberals looked at me like I was crazy. “Well, that’s an interesting variety,” one said. Okay, sneered. She sneered.

A UU man said, ” I saw a sign recently that said ‘God is still speaking.’ I wondered who they think He, or It, is speaking to.” He was obviously and coldly disgusted by the irrationality of this.

I said, “Yea, that’s the new United Church of Christ campaign, the God is Still Speaking campaign.”

He said, “So who do they think God is speaking to?” The sarcasm fairly dripped.

“To everyone!” I said.

He replied, “I read that there’s a certain point in the Old Testament where God just stops talking. ..”

“Yes,” I interrupted. “As a specific theophany to individuals, yes, that happens at a point in the Hebrew Scriptures.”

The man looked at me like this was of very little interest to him. I shouldn’t have interrupted him, but I saw where he was going and it was just more sarcasm and biting disdain for the stupid idea that God “speaks” to anyone, at any time. I guess the expression “revelation is not sealed” doesn’t ring with spiritual promise for everyone.

Which leads me to ask, how is God still speaking in your life? If that framework doesn’t work for you, let me put it this way: where do you find “revelation(s)?”

In a related question, a reader just wrote to me and asked how I experience the “living Christ.” I’ll write about that later, but if you feel like responding to her, go right ahead.

Are Pastors Paid To Love?

I’m reading through some of the essays in The Life of Meaning: Reflections on Faith, Doubt and Repairing the World by Bob Abernethy and William Bole. I come across one by Barbara Brown Taylor, who says that she would love to return to service as a parish minister because she really misses the work, but she would never take a paycheck to do it. Here she is:

“I hope I would never take pay again to do that, because it felt too much like being paid to love. And you know what that is, when you get paid to love. I know there are people who can keep their pay separate from their love, but too much of parish ministry seemed to me as if I were being paid to love people. Then my heart got very confused about my job.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor, “I’m Spiritual, Not Religious”

Well, this just floored me (although since I was lying on the couch at the time I didn’t have far to go to the floor). Was she insinuating that those of us who accept a paycheck to do parish ministry are basically prostitutes? Whaaaat? Girl, step off!

I never think of parish ministry as being paid to love people. I feel that I’m being paid to make all of my time and energy available for the work of the church. In fact, what strikes me as eminently sad about parish ministry today is how often ministers seem to do everything BUT love their people, and they think they’re being paid to enlighten and transform them their people in their own image. I mean, you could pay me six figures to do the work of the church, but that doesn’t guarantee love. Love can’t be bought or evaluated. The church knows, I hope, when their pastor loves them. If their pastor doesn’t love them, it doesn’t matter what else he or she does well, does it?

I talk about my call to ministry as a sort of mystical urging, but really it was more like God beat me unconscious in the parking lot, tied my hands and feet together, put a pillowcase over my head and drove off with my body in the trunk of His car. When I came to, I was still trussed up and lying in Andover Hall at Harvard Divinity School. God just couldn’t get me there any other way.

When I grieve over all that I leave undone as a pastor, I try to be compassionate about the fact that I’m incredibly unsuited to the work of ministry, have a really bad temperment for it, the absolutely wrong kind of upbringing, and that it takes me an extraordinary amount of effort just to mold myself into a vague approximation of the the right kind of person for the job. Some pastors engage in spiritual practice to make them yet more patient and wise, tranquil and productive. I engage in spiritual practice just to take the edge off my state of perpetual overwrought angstiness and frustration with the world as it is, and to give me the courage to walk out the door as a representative of the loving God.

But I’ll tell you one thing: it sure never crossed my mind that ministers were being paid to love their people. If I had any doubt that that part would come naturally and pretty effortlessly, I would have cut myself out of those ropes back at Andover Hall and run like hell for my life.

MLB All-Star Game

Can I just break genre for a moment to gripe about the All-Star Game last night on Fox?

My beefs:

It was scheduled to begin at 8 pm but we didn’t get started on the game until almost 9:00, due to a bunch of pre-game garbage.

The telecast was a mess: too many flash-backs and extraneous videos to be able to focus on the game. Fire that producer! We don’t need extensive footage of the guys in kayaks outside the park and their swimming dog, okay? We just want to watch the GAME.

Did Barry Bonds need to VELCRO himself to Willie Mays’ side in every shot of Mays? Yea, BB, we KNOW he’s your godfather. We still think you’re a juiced up disgrace to the game. Go away.

Was it not obvious to everyone that pretty much all the players had partied ’til 3AM the night before and were playing like a bunch of Keystone Cops? Why aren’t the sports writers covering this? How many errors should we reasonably expect to see at an MLB All-Star game, fer cryin’ out loud?? It’s one thing if the ball has a wicked spin on it and you’ve contorted yourself like Gumby in an effort to get your mitt around it and fail. It’s another thing entirely when the ball goes rolling by at about O miles per hour and you, hung-over at third base, watch it roll past your feet with an expression on your face like Homer Simpson thinking about donuts. GET THAT BALL, Son! That’s why you earn eleventy billion dollars a year!

Petty, but…what’s with those stupid sleeveless jerseys on the Pirates players? And Cardinals management, take a cue from the Orioles in how to design uniforms for bird-named teams that don’t look totally dorky. We know who you are. We don’t need the six inch red bird all over your shirt to make it more obvious. What’s next? Eye patches and big gold hoops for the Pirates?

AL Manager Jim Leyland, how could you KEEP FRANCISCO RODRIGUEZ ON THE MOUND FOR THAT LONG IN THE 9TH AFTER PULLING J.J. PUTZ AS FAST AS YOU DID? Do you care NOTHING for my coronary health?

Take This Bread: Anticipatory Review

My heart is thumping. It always does when especially cool convergences occur.

Just two weekends ago I attended worship at Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in Portland, Oregon. I spent a bunch of money in their bookstore, but I didn’t buy the book that most interested me because it was a hardcover and my luggage was already full to bursting. I decided to buy it at home.

So today, outta nowhere and apropos of nothing, I get an e-mail from a woman named Sara Miles saying that she’s a fan of this blog and an admirer of my writing and she’d like to send me a copy of her book.

After I check her web site I realize, holy cow, this is the author of the book I couldn’t put down in Portland! It’s called Take This Bread: A Radical Conversion. Well, now I really can’t WAIT to read it.

Serendipitalicious.

Sweating It Out On Sunday Morning

Berry’s Mom has written a fantastic, detailed account of the typical Sunday morning for most ministers. For everyone who thought that clergy just showed up on Sunday mornings and breezed into the pulpit, here’s a behind-the-scenes correction to that perception.

Now you know why we need a nap on Sunday afternoons.

Couldn’t Wait To Get To Church, Or Why I Love the Bible

I went to bed really late last night, as is my wont in the summer time. It was 2:00 AM before I really tucked in, although I knew I’d want to wake up at 8 AM to get to a 10:00 church service in the city.

As I had my breakfast and got ready to leave, I realized that I was filled with a feeling of thrilled anticipation to go to church ! What a wonderful feeling! I wondered if my own congregants ever felt this way: this kind of first-day-of-school excitement. I certainly hope they do on occasion.

I climbed into the car for a fairly long drive and almost popped in a tape of a sermon from the Festival of Homiletics but decided to wait to hear the word from the preacher at the church I’d be visiting.

And then it hit me: I can’t wait to go to church because I’m so psyched to hear what the preacher has to say about the Bible!

How did THAT happen?
Me, a serious Bible lover?

Well, apparently so!

I have been studying Christian and Jewish scripture formally and informally, on and off, for about twelve years now. Suddenly, in the summer of 2007, I look up and realize that the stories and characters in the Bible are real to me, and precious. I care about them. They are people with whom I have a relationship, and whose experience of the living God helps me encounter the living God, too. I honor their interpretation of their experience even as I vehemently disagree with it at times. They were, as I am, products of their time and place. Their vision, as is mine, was limited. “Now we see through a glass, darkly.”

I realized this morning that it makes so much sense that I would come to madly love the Bible. Books in general have had a tremendous influence on my life and are like food and drink to me. If you could gain weight from reading I’d be 500 lbs. by now. So it’s no surprise, duh, that The Good Book would worm its way into my heart, soul and mind and draw me into deeper engagement with not only its stories, but its spiritual power.

Duh, again. The Bible does have tremendous spiritual power. Are you kidding? All those billions of people over all those years diving into that text and looking to it to address the deepest questions of their lives? Yeah, there’s a little bit of powerful mojo there.

I knew that this morning in church we might be hearing lectionary texts about Naman from 2 Kings, or the wonderful story from Luke’s gospel where Jesus tells the disciples to shake the dust from their feet if a community doesn’t want to receive their ministry. I knew that there was a chance the preacher would talk about that bizarre moment in Luke 10 when Jesus says, “I watched Satan fall down from heaven like a flash of lightening.” What a great moment; a trippy mystical vision following all that eminently practical pastoral advice. I was downright excited.

As it turns out, the preacher preached on Psalm 30, and that was fine, too. I’ve grown to love the psalms over the years, too, although I initially thought them a bizarre, dreary collection of violence and complaint. Now I see them as a record of sacred kvetching, but also as a beautifully crafted, poetic account of one individual’s troubled and transcendent relationship with their inscrutable God. Before we had psychotherapy, people had the psalms. They are deeply healing and integrative. There isn’t one emotion I’ve ever had that the Psalmist didn’t have. There isn’t one spiritual question, doubt or ethical dilemma I’ve had that the Psalmist didn’t address.

The Bible is, for me, an ancient record of my ancestors attempt to explain the ways of God as they experienced it. I think they got a lot wrong, but I believe that they got so much right, too.

As for Jesus in the Bible, well… just when you think you know Jesus, you turn back to the Bible and realize that you don’t know him at all. I read a lot of books about religion and an awful lot of those books are about what Jesus supposedly was and what Jesus supposedly did and wanted us to do. I read a lot of theology and sociological commentary on what the Church is supposedly about and what God wants us to do, and how God may or may not exist, and all that. I read thousands and thousands of pages of this stuff every year. And yet every time I open the actual Bible and read it in whatever translation, it’s like being doused with a bucket of refreshingly cool water. Let me make this analogy: you can read about music, or you can hear it. You can read about falling in love, or you can experience it. You can look at a photograph of food in Gourmet magazine or you can taste it. If you want to get into the living God of Jewish and Christian tradition, you can read theology or you can read the Bible.

Read and taste. Read and hear. Read and experience.

And there I was thinking that that particular revelation was totally sealed. Silly me. But here’s the thing: it took a lot of work and intellectual commitment before the Bible began to reveal its beauty and power to me. I’m so glad I didn’t follow the example of all the “enlightened” people I’ve known over the years who are persuaded that only fools and fanatics bother with it.

Union United Methodist Church, Boston

I’ll be worshiping with this congregation tomorrow morning. I visited the church when they hosted the Interfaith Pride Service in June and the pastor invited everyone to come back, so I’m coming back!!

[Update: In the updates of church visits, I will share worship innovations or practices that I think might be of interest to clergy and lay readers. - PB]

1. During the welcome of visitors, the pastor had the drummer play a long riff of welcome as we stood. Then the pianist did a long glissando — it was a fun, jazzy way to say, “we’re glad you’re here.”
2. Music was casually interwoven throughout the entire service, which I loved. Where there weren’t formal songs or hymns, there were amen choruses or short refrains of old classics like, “Great is thy faithfulness.” The praise band was awesome -more jazzy than contemporary.
3. The service started late, but with no anxiety. It was more like, “We’ll get there when we get there.” This felt just right for summer worship, and the community was friendly and engaging so I didn’t feel weird and alone. 4. Immediately after the conclusion of the postlude, a recording of Stevie Wonder singing “Signed, Sealed, Delivered” came on. It TOTALLY WORKED. It made me laugh, and we all went out in joy.
4. At the sermon, the pastor took a podium into the aisle and preached from there. He started behind the podium and then stepped out, taking only the microphone with him. He preached the politic (inveighing against the war in Iraq at the beginning) and then moved to the personal. He was extremely relational and loving, asking for call and response with ease and humor, and getting it. (It is an African-American congregation)

Overall, this congregation has something that I think would appeal to any visitor: genuine warmth and a spirit of praise and delight in being together in life’s struggles and hardships. I will definitely go back. The congregation lives in an old Universalist church!