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The Bible: A Love Story

I gave this sermon in 2011. I post it here in response to a Twitter exchange with @Eugene_Debs.

Here is the secular reading I used in the service. I think it’s great background.

“What Is the Bible For?” The Rev. Paige Getty

In January 1604, King James I of England convened a conference where a new English version of the Christian Bible was conceived in response to the so-called “problems” that the Puritans (a faction within the Church of England) had detected in the two earlier English translations. King James gave the translators instructions that were intended to ensure that the new version would more adequately conform to the expectations of the Church of England and its beliefs about ordained clergy. The translation was conducted by 47 scholars, whose “mandate was to improve on the earlier English Bibles — ‘to make…out of many good ones, one principall good one.’” (Freeman) All of them were members of the Church of England, and they finished their work in 1611. (Wikipedia)

Because this translation was then “appointed to be read in Churches”(Crystal 9), and has been a very popular – if not the most popular – English translation of the Bible for the past 400 years, it gets credit for introducing the Bible into common usage.

Last year a writer (David Crystal) published a book about the way the King James Bible has influenced our English language – he counts 257 common idioms (“the expressions we use and modify freely with no reference to their origins”) that can be traced to the Bible, and were popularized because of the broad exposure that people have had to the King James Bible over time. (Freeman)

“Whenever you hear phrases such as the salt of the earth, a man after our own heart, let there be light, two-edged sword, how are the mighty fallen, rod of iron, wheels within wheels, get thee behind me, Satan, new wine in old bottles, a voice crying in the wilderness, a fly in the ointment, you are hearing echoes of the prose of the KJV.” (Shaw)

THE SERMON

The Bible: A Love Story

The Rev. Dr . Victoria Weinstein

 

Suppose you sat down with some friends and brought out cherished photo albums from your family’s past. There’s great-grandmother, with her handmade gown and veil, your beautiful great-grandma and her proud groom, circa 1893. Later photos show your grandfather, their son, riding a Model-T. It was the first in the family. In the photo, relatives are gathered around, beaming; some looking nervous. A guy rides a horse and cart by and the rider looks skeptically at the locomotive. You can almost hear him saying, “It will never catch on.”

Your friends, sitting next to you on the couch, give you strained smiles.

“Wouldn’t it be better if you put this all on-line?” one asks. “Then you could e-mail them to us and we could see them on the screen. It would be so much easier.” You agree that it would be, and you’ll think about it. But you love the closeness of sitting together and looking through the album in person, on the couch.

Another friend points at great-grandmother’s wedding dress. “Good God, is that handmade? What a nightmare. It’s so awful that they didn’t have the technology back then that would have spared whoever made that gown the hours of backbreaking work over those buttonholes! Women were so oppressed. It’s so sad, an arranged marriage.”

The first friend pipes up again. “Look at that old car. They were all so excited about it, but of course they had no way of knowing that the Model-T would be the beginning of the suburbanization of America and the awful, soul-killing labor of working on an assembly line. Henry Ford was such a tyrant.”

Thoroughly wounded now, your joy ruined, the images you will always find beautiful obviously not respected by these critical eyes, you put the photo album back on the shelf. You know that you will never again share them with these friends, or anyone like them.

The four-hundredth anniversary of the publication of the King James Bible this year gives me an opportunity to share with you my own feelings about this grand work of Western religion, literature and culture. As you may have guessed, the analogy of the photo album is my attempt to express to you how I feel the Good Book has been treated by too many of my best religious friends, that is, the Unitarian Universalists and other free-thinkers who cannot read it without judging it by today’s standards.

The Bible is a collection of stories, teachings, visions, recipes, love letters, declarations of despair, warnings, and blessings –  from our great-great-great and going back many many generations great grandmothers and grandfathers. It is the family album of the Western world, the lore, the poetry — the cherished artifact that shows us how our ancestors saw the world, what sense they made of it, how they saw God, how they saw their place in the cosmos — and it chronicles how that understanding changed over time.  The evolution of human understanding is in there, too. Yes, the snapshots in the Bible show a world unsophisticated, where everything is roughly hewn by human hands — including the concept of God. The images are primitive, the covenants and conflicts and concepts hard to relate to, the sociology disturbing, the psychology woefully dysfunctional.  And yet it is shot through with threads of pure gold. And the King James Version is particularly full of gold:

The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.

He makes me lie down in green pastures.

My cup runneth over.

Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever.

We still say that in funerals today because people still request it.  For most people, there is no other version that evokes the beauty of the desire for eternal peace the way the KJV translation of the 23rd psalm does.

This family album is precious. It is yellowed with age but its wisdom has not expired. Its images and stories bind us to our past and can illuminate our present.  Job, the suffering man who cannot understand why he is so cursed.  Ruth, the immigrant worker and her immortal words to her mother-in-law as she expresses loyalty to her new land: “Entreat me not to leave thee, [or] to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people [shall be] my people, and thy God my God.” The passionate friendship of Jonathan and David. The book of Psalms, to which so many of us turned after 9/11 (I did that very day as soon as I saw the news, in fact) — the psalmist giving voice to our sense of dread and agony, our need to know that even if we were bombed that night (as those of us close to the attacks thought we might be), our souls could come to no harm:

“Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night nor for the arrow that flieth by day; nor for the pestilence that walketh in darkness; nor for the destruction that wasteth at noonday…. Thou has made the LORD, which is my refuge, even the most High, thy habitation. There shall no evil befall thee… For he shall give his angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all thy ways.” (Psalm 91)

More images from the family album:

The man of Galilee, walking the lonesome road, eating a Last Supper in the upper room with his closest disciples:  “Henceforth I call you not servants, but I have called you friends.” The tripped-out apocalyptic vision of the Book of Revelation, whose images and symbolism of an empire destroyed by the wrath of God still captivates readers today, generating fodder for poets, scholars, historians, psychologists, artists, movie makers… and yes, a lot of nut jobs.

This book is old. It is archaic and cryptic and no easy read.  You should probably not go it alone if it is your first time. And yet, it is the one book I would choose to take with me to the proverbial desert island. It is my family photo album, my family being all of humankind.  It has within it the entire record of human nature — good and evil and everything in between – and of divine nature — benevolent, cruel and ultimately mysterious.  It is the most compelling, outrageous soap opera ever aired (have you ever read Genesis!?). It asks all the big questions that have ever been asked and starts the process of tackling them. The Bible is a fine companion in joy and sorrow, and it never abandons the reader who will not abandon it.  There is a character in there who is you, no matter what day or at what age you read it.  It is a treasure trove, a vast repository of human folly and wisdom.

I grew up thoroughly unacquainted with the Bible, except for those few stories that I heard in my UU Sunday School — things like Adam and Eve, and vague murmurings about Jesus now and then — and the stories that I soaked in through the wider culture: movies like “The Greatest Story Ever Told,” “The Ten Commandments,” Monty Python’s “The Life Of Brian,” or the musical “Godspell” and “Jesus Christ Superstar.” I sort of knew the Lord’s Prayer, and there was a disco version of it in 1973 that helped with that. [sings] My grandmother was outraged. If you asked me what the first phrase of the 23rd psalm was, I would have answered,  “Now I lay me down to sleep…?”

And so, ironically, by not knowing the content or the basic purpose of any of the library of books we refer to as the Bible,  I was literarily and intellectually impoverished. I could not go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art or look through art books and understand the stories recounted by hundreds of my favorite paintings. Why was that woman holding a man’s head on a plate? Who was that woman in blue weeping at the feet of that dead man on the Cross? What was that bizarre plot twist in “Pinnochio” when he gets swallowed by a whale!? Where did that come from? What did it mean?

When we read Hemingway’s The Old Man And the Sea in junior year and our teacher spent most of one lecture discussing the Christian symbolism in the novel — — and most of my schoolmates nodded knowingly and took notes, I was humiliated and felt left out and ignorant. The same thing happened with the novels of John Steinbeck the next year: I had no reference point for understanding the primal struggle that went on between the two brothers, Aaron and Caleb (standing in for Cain and Abel).  I did not know that the title East of Eden came from the Bible.  Classical music was less meaningful for me because I refused to think about the lyrics to the many oratorios, cantatas, masses and choral works I sang and loved through all my high school years. I missed the point of thousands of lines of poetry, deprived of an entire vocabulary of references that a knowledge of the Bible would have given me.  All I heard was “LORD” and “Christ” and other things I didn’t believe in. And so I closed my ears, never believing that any part of that sacred story was my inheritance.  Ignorance kept me defiant and rejecting.

I am still profoundly sorry about that vast omission in my education, which was entirely the fault of modern adults in my life who thought the Bible too primitive, ridiculous, dangerous, hateful, destructive, anti-Semitic, anti-feminist, anti-gay, anti-intellectual for me to know.  Also the fault of my Unitarian Universalist church, whose job it specifically was to acquaint me with our Biblical heritage.  I am still catching up, and I feel cheated of years of conversation and Bible study.

Who’s afraid of the big, bad Bible?

Apparently, many of us. The way religious liberals too often treat the Bible and it reminds me of that great moment in the musical “1776” when Rhode Island’s founding father Stephen Hopkins, in regards to debating the subject of independence from England, says, “Well, in all my years I ain’t never heard, seen nor smelled an issue that was so dangerous it couldn’t be talked about.”

Biblical fundamentalism has ruined the Bible for many. And I understand why. To create another analogy to go along with the photo album analogy, let’s think of the Bible as a sumptuous meal. It is filling. It is flavorful. It is spicy, and also sweet. It is ancestral food, the kind we call “soul food.” It’s mom’s best cooking. But say you go to someone’s house and they put a plate of this food down done all wrong. It’s over-cooked, dry as can be, it chokes going down your throat but they don’t allow any beverages at the dinner table. Eating becomes a form of torture. You don’t know what you did to deserve this, but your hosts keep saying, “EAT MORE! IT’S GOOD FOR YOU!”  Your eyes water, and you simply cannot eat more. It is making you seriously ill. This is not comfort food, it’s punishment food. Who can blame you for never wanting to see it on your plate again?

I cannot. So I understand those who want to avoid the Bible, but encourage them to take it up and study it within a context of liberal religious interpretation. The whole foundation of liberal religion is the freedom to interpret, and the responsibility to do so from a learned place!  So for us, that means that the Bible should be taken seriously if not literally, that it can and should be discussed, looked at in historical context, and viewed through the lens of critical (not rejecting and criticizing but critical) analysis.

It is so important that you understand our religious heritage:  I want you to know that the whole project of translating the Bible from the Latin (and the earlier Greek) into English was specifically so that it could be read by everyone, not just the clergy. So that it could be discussed, debated, taught, studied, pored over in each household and not just in the church. The whole point of the King James Bible was to make the book accessible to lay people! To think that we have, in this era, voluntarily abdicated the right to speak with authority from the Bible to the fundamentalists just breaks my heart.  When we do that, we are truly dishonoring the memory of the men and women who founded this congregation, for whom personal knowledge of Scripture was one of the absolute highest responsibilities and privileges in their lives. We are also cheating ourselves and our children of a glorious literary and spiritual inheritance.

But I don’t want you ever to read the Bible as an ammunition-gathering exercise.  The Bible is not a weapon.  Some use it that way, but that does not mean that we should.  There is no integrity in memorizing a few Bible quotes to use only as a rebuttal to the stupid, abusive uses of the Bible.  We can either refute Scriptural interpretation from a knowledgeable place or I it’s also fine to say, “I don’t agree with you, but I’m not going to argue with you.”  Pulling the sentence one likes out of the Bible to prove a point is called “proof-texting,” and it is a cheap exercise that is beneath any thinking person. You cannot win an argument with a proof-texting Biblical literalist, so I advise you to walk away if you can.

Nor is the Bible an archeological artifact to be analyzed under a microscope as if it had no deeper use than to establish whether or not the events and people recorded in it are historically real before its stories can be deemed worthy of reading and taking seriously. That is the surest way to kill the imaginative power of the Bible, and I neither respect nor encourage that method  of Bible study — which I consider not so much study as vivisection.  The Good Book will never yield up its wisdom to the reader who examines it clinically with scalpel in hand.

The Bible is a scrapbook of letters and photos compiled by the generations, including some photographs of immoral, hateful relatives you don’t want to know, and some letters from grandfathers and grandmothers whose house you would never want to visit.  True to its comprehensive nature, the book is embraced by all different kinds of members of the family, and for different reasons. There’s no reason to let the mean, hateful aunts and uncles have total possession of it, and we have let them hog it for way too long in this generation. I think we need to march over to their house and take it back so that our own children can see the pictures and know the stories, and we can help them understand what it means and how we see it, and they can grow to love the whole of it and feel that it belongs to them.

“Did this stuff really happen?” your children will ask as you sit on the couch and turns its pages together. And you can respond, “That actually doesn’t matter in the least. What matters is that people a long time ago cared enough about this story that they were willing to make huge sacrifices and even die so that you could hear it. They wanted so much for you to hear it, not to wonder whether these things actually happened or not, but so that these stories would change your heart. So let’s take a look at them, and see what we can find together.”

As great-great-great-great-great-and-going-back many generations great-uncle Paul wrote to the community at Philippi, according to the King James Version of this beloved letter,

Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things.

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Earth Day: Struggling Against Despair and a Sense of Preacherly Futility

 

[I preached this four years ago and it seems so inadequate to the enormity of the subject that I am embarrassed. What do we say? This coming Sunday, I will be using Bill McKibbon’s “Eaarth” as my inspiration, and reflecting on an article in this month’s Christian Century called “Missing Winter: Notes From the Farm” by Terra Brockman.  Wendell Berry’s “In the Presence of Fear: Three Essays for a Changed World” is also a source.   – PB]

 

“Stay Together, Learn the Flowers, Go Light”

An Earth Day Sermon, 2008

Rev. Victoria Weinstein

“We affirm the interdependent web of existence of which we are all a part.”  – the 7th Unitarian Universalist Principle

 

I think of those times I am on an airplane looking down over a city, flying in over water or farm fields, or mountains or rural emptiness.  Before we see the busy patterns of lights that characterize any city from the sky, there is first the darkness of the empty landscape – a deceptive darkness that seems to indicate nothing is going on in that place.  Which is untrue, of course.  Wherever there is land or sea, there is busy, messy life happening, perhaps invisible to the human eye from a distance (or even up close), but nevertheless intricate, immense and important.

And it is all part of the interdependent web: not just the evocative electronic beckon of the city where I will be landing, and getting into a cab or onto a bus or subway to find my hotel and food and rest and relationship with other humans, but the silent work of the earthworms, or the coral reefs, or the fungi, protozoa and algae.

I was sitting this past summer on the coast of Oregon looking at the gray, serene ocean at low tide.  Gulls and terns were at their business on the shore, and I had walked in tidal pools full of mollusks and waving seaweeds, crouching down to see tiny crustaceans scrambling around on tiny legs feeding and running errands of their kind.  But now, late afternoon, all was still.

I must have been so peaceful I was almost asleep, sitting cross-legged on the packed sand.  I had given up searching the horizon for whales and dolphins and was staring at the water close by the shore.  I heard a strong exhalation, a kind of snort, and blinked. Right in front of me – in fact, almost directly where I had been focusing my sight– was a seal, whose wet, puppy-dog eyes were looking right into mine.  His sleek head had blended in so well with the dark water, I hadn’t even noticed him.  He was such a sweet revelation of all the life going on around the human story that we so easily miss – creatures whose lives are bound with ours in a common planetary destiny, who need humans to pay attention and to take more responsibility for our impact on the Earth.

On a boat ride near the Everglades this past January, again, the dark waters opened up and dolphins jumped out, playing and diving in the wake of our boat, causing all the human riders pure joy and unadulterated reverence.  I call this a theophany, literally translated as “appearance of God,” a divine revelation.  All that life, that intelligence, revealing itself to us when all we saw seconds earlier was placid blue.

I walk my dog in a backyard that seems very much the same in the evening as it did that morning, but his nose, superior by far to mine, knows otherwise.  Where I see nothing happening in our tiny corner of creation, he smells universes of activity, change, growth, and decay.  From his perspective out there, humans are not front page news.  Earth was given as a garden for him, too, and for the dolphins and the seals, and also for the enormous crocodiles I also saw sunning themselves in the Everglades, and the waterbug the size of my hand who sucks the life out of frogs in a pond. Earth was given as a garden for the praying mantis and the cockroach, and the tarantula, and even the stingray whose barb knocked into Steve Irwin and killed him.  Mother Nature commands our reverence, but she’s not always cute and fuzzy.  We will have gained a great deal of wisdom, I think, when we expand our consciousness of stewardship of the Earth to those aspects of it that are not pleasing to the eye or the ear, that are not meant for human comfort, speed or convenience, and whose purpose we have yet to determine in the grand scheme of things.  There is good evidence that creation is its own grand scheme.

The Seventh Principle is often interpreted to be specifically and exclusively about environmentalism.  And there’s nothing wrong with that per se: after all, we are living in a time of urgent awareness of climate change and other ecological crises.  I think the challenge in thinking about the 7th Principle for me comes down to the difference between righteousness and self-righteousness, my cause vs. your cause, this people’s particular way of depleting the Earth vs. that people’s way of doing so.  All sentient beings are connected through this magnificent web, not just the ones I personally like.  Can I, an American who consumes so much fossil fuel, judge and condemn the desperate African man who illegally hunts gorillas and slaughters them for bush meat?  Can I, the woman whose toxic hair dye goes down the drain at the hair salon every 8 or 9 weeks and who undoubtedly wears clothing manufactured in sweat shops, afford to consider myself morally superior to the men and women cutting their way through the rain forest because it’s the only job they can get?

This is a magnificent web we are part of, but it also a terribly tangled web of economies, cultures, competing ideologies, and government systems of varying degrees of stability.  I wonder: Will environmental awareness be a trend of our times, and will it prove too hard and require too much sacrifice to really change our ways to last? Will we, community by community, nation by nation, be willing to honestly evaluate our destructive impact on the delicate balance and diversity of creation, find alternative methods for environmentally unsound practices, and do what it takes to make them habit and even enforceable policy?  Even to the point of personal and communal sacrifice?

Who goes first?  And if I’m not doing enough, which prophet should I heed who will tell me how much more I must do?

I am very aware of mixed feelings of panic, anger, guilt and self-righteousness in my own efforts to be use resources more mindfully. There is so much information to take in, such a wide world of connection to consider.  I think, I will do the little bit that I can do.

I have told you of my efforts to eat food that is locally grown, which is how I became acquainted with Holly Hill Farm in Cohasset; by going regularly to the farmer’s market there.  I find the effort to avoid buying food that has traveled thousands of miles to get to my local store extremely difficult.  Sometimes I even forget to make the effort.

I recycle pretty faithfully and get angry when I realize that it’s not enough to recycle the cardboard box the facial moisturizer comes in if the empty plastic tube is eventually going into the landfill.  I admit to over-using dish soap so my pots and pans aren’t greasy when I put them away, but have at least learned to turn off the water while I scrub. Not enough. But something.

I almost always carry my own cloth bags to the grocery, and I refuse bags of any kind when a purchase will fit in my purse. I read the newspaper online so as to avoid buying and recycling the newspaper. I call 800 numbers and get off catalog lists, but they just seem to come faster and faster.

I am a bit of a tyrant about bathroom water usage, remembering not only our drought summers on the South Shore, but holding in my memory a long line of Guatemalan women walking down a steep path to Lake Atitlan with clay jugs on their heads, and back up again with the heavy jugs balanced  – their water for the day.  My dog’s doody bags are bio-degradable but for all I know, his collar and leash were manufactured in a sweatshop somewhere.  How much awareness is enough? Wouldn’t we like to raise our hands and say, “May I please be excused?”

This is the good news and the bad news: our religious commitment to respecting that we are all interconnected in a web of existence requires that we do think about what we use, how much energy we consume, our accountability not only to our neighbors and families but to all creation – even the dull, the mean, the oppressors of the animal and the human kingdom.  There is a vigilance required of us on many levels that can seem exhausting when we first consider them, but for which we are, I believe, totally suited by virtue of our conscience and our intellect.  Vigilance and attention to what we use and re-use.  Attention and vigilance to how our combined consumption affects the Earth, but refraining from self-righteous of the other guy who isn’t doing enough.  Persuading by example, not by harangue.  Attention to government policy, attention and vigilance to how our needs and desires as consumers influence local economies elsewhere in the world. Refraining from condemnation until we have made the requisite effort to understand the full picture of someone else’s struggles to survive.

This is not to say that guilt, shame and anxiety are the motivators or the way we maintain this vigilance.  Rather, let us be motivated by the spirit of reverence, what the Jewish tradition calls “tikkun olam,” the restoration of the world as it is.  Reverence must be the starting point for all our meditations on the interdependent web of existence, for it is only if we are led by reverence that we can go forth in love.

In the work of vigilance and stewardship of creation, let us heed the poets as well as the prophets, and especially this poet today, who advised:

The rising hills, the slopes,
of statistics
lie before us.
the steep climb
of everything, going up,
up, as we all
go down.
In the next century
or the one beyond that,
they say,
are valleys, pastures,
if we make it.

To climb these coming crests
one word to you, to
you and your children:

stay together
learn the flowers
go light.

— Gary Snyder, ”For the Children”, from Turtle Island

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“Give Up” A Lenten Sermon

 

“Give Up”

A Lenten Sermon by the Rev. Dr. Victoria Weinstein

 

I would like to share with you a poem I often read at funerals for people who lived with a particular intensity. It is one of my favorites, by the poet May Sarton (who also lived with a particular intensity). It is called “Now, Voyager.”

 

 

Now voyager, lay here your dazzled head.

Come back to earth from air, be nourished,

Not with that light on light, but with this bread.

 

Here close to earth be cherished, mortal heart,

Hold your way deep as roots push rocks apart

To bring the spurt of green up from the dark.

 

Where music thundered let the mind be still,

Where the will triumphed let there be no will,

What light revealed, now let the dark fulfill.

 

Here close to earth the deeper pulse is stirred,

Here where no wings rush and no sudden bird,

But only heart-beat upon beat is heard.

 

Here let the fiery burden be all spilled,

The passionate voice at last be calmed and stilled

And the long yearning of the blood fulfilled.

 

Now voyager, come home, come home to rest,

Here on the long-lost country of earth’s breast

Lay down the fiery vision and be blest, be blest.

 

The poem speaks about the peace that comes with death, but also a peace that we can cultivate while we are alive. “Where music thundered, let the mind be still.”

Peace is such a beautiful idea, and such a blessed condition to be in. It is the ultimate free and universally available healing drug, and yet I often wonder if we really want it.  I wonder if we feel that we can afford to strive for peace. I feel often, that we live in a state of constant vigilance, constant appraisal, constant judgment, as though our soul’s salvation lay in thinking the right thoughts all the time and having the right opinions. This is our species’ “fiery burden,” one that I am particularly mindful in this season of pre-presidential election politics and general public divisiveness. So much seems at stake, can we afford to give ourselves to peace? Is not peace, in these times, some sort of capitulation, maybe even irresponsible? If I am in a state of peace, if I do not remain on hair trigger outrage alert, the enemy will win. The world will fall apart. No one is listening. I must make my point more loudly and insistently!

 

I understand this instinct and have felt it, too. The problem is, it is not a healthy instinct. We can be responsible people and be at peace. We can work toward justice and be at peace. We can remain aware of the world of it is and maintain a passionate vision of the world as it ought to be, and cultivate peace, the silent center of humility and surrender of self that brings equanimity and compassionate presence.   In fact, I begin to think that this is the only way the world will have a chance – if more of us recognize this fact and work to disengage ourselves from our full-time commitment to remaining in a state of argument. Always loaded for bear and ready to go.  All of our fiery opinions, our thundering mind and mouths, are they contributing to the common good?  “Lay down the fiery vision and be blest. Be blest.” I have come to believe that when we bond with our fellow man more over outrage than on shared loves and joys, there is a huge cost in creativity, goodness and inspiration.

 

These reflections are prompted by this coming Wednesday’s marking of the beginning of the season of Lent, the 40-day period before Easter where Christians are encouraged to enter into a time of introspection, with a special emphasis on penitence and the examination of one’s sinfulness. This has never been a popular exercise in the Unitarian or Universalist traditions, which makes sense. After all, as the old joke goes, the Universalists always believed that God is too good to damn them, and the Unitarians believed they were too good for God to damn. Therefore, you will find that many Unitarian and Universalist (and now UU) congregations observed Lent as a season of devotion, writing Lenten meditation manuals to guide daily reflections.

If you grew up Catholic, you will remember Lent as a 40-day period where you gave something up. Maybe dessert, or candy, or some other luxury.  I am setting a challenge for myself that will be much more difficult to give up than any exterior treat: I am going to try to give up the “fiery burden” of constant passionate opinion, or at least to notice how often I feel obligated or entitled to offer mine. How often I find common cause with friends and strangers in hating the same things. I want to try to give that up for Lent.

There is something in the created order that does not care what you or I think, and that is a good thing. I remember the words of the old poem, “God’s in his heaven, all’s right with the world.” Well, all’s not right with the world. However, our constant opinionating will probably not make it more right. Pursuing peace may.

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