"Trust: A Fundamental Requirement"

Monday, March 31, 2014

During All-School Mass today, the priest asked what would have happened in today's gospel if the official hadn't just believed Jesus's word that his daughter would be healed?  What if he had insisted that Jesus come to his home and lay His hands on her?

I realize the priest meant it as more of a rhetorical point but I imagine it would have been one of two things.  Jesus would have come, to help him in his imperfect faith, or Jesus would have said to go and see for himself that the deed had been done.  I think that's what would have happened because the official's trust was not misplaced.

It was not a magic spell or a test that saved his daughter's life.  It was God, reaching down, full of love and willing to lend a special sign.  The official didn't pass a test to save his daughter.  Then his trust would have been, in some ways, unfounded.  Jesus was worthy of that trust.  He wouldn't play games with the official's daughter's life.

I think Trust might be a better word than Certainty for what I've always been blessed to have -- through no accomplishment or virtue of my own but as a free gift that has always been present -- in my relationship with God.  But it can still be scary to act on trust, even when you feel it there.  Even when you feel certain and safe.  You feel foolish for your feelings, for your certainty that Someone has your back.  But it's there, when you have Trust.  You can turn around and head home, having come all that way and leaving without the prize.

If you have faith.

The reflection booklet asks if we are trustworthy.  I admit, I am a happily single woman.  You wouldn't believe how people hunt for bitterness or defeat or any of that insecurity nonsense in my voice when I say that statement out loud.  But what I want in my life someday is a partner who I can trust like I trust God -- not for any reason but because they have my back -- and I want to be worthy of that trust.

"Paradox: Light and Darkness"

Sunday, March 30, 2014

I'm not entirely sure whoever wrote the reflection booklet knows what a paradox is.  At the very least, they forgot they were going to mention paradoxes in the reflection.  But that's a superficial complaint.

It does make me think, though, about how our eyes adjust to the darkness.  It seems a simple but profound enough metaphor -- we forget how dark it is, because our eyes adjust to the darkness.  So that when some true light enters, we feel blinded by it.  It feels oppressive and even painful.  But only because we have been in darkness.  Only because we have sat in darkness until we convinced ourselves that THAT is the way the world is supposed to work.  It only feels like an invasion -- like unnecessary piousness -- because our eyes are working so hard to see in the dark.

The light will only blind us for a moment.

But I can't help thinking of another story and how it twists that metaphor.

Once, my family and I took a trip that included a tour of an impressive cave formation.  At the end of the tour, the guide turned off all of the lights that had guided our way.  Not just in the final cavern but throughout the cave so that everything around us was black.  He spoke into that unsettling darkness and told us that no matter how long we waited, our eyes would never adjust to the darkness.  There was no light at all -- nothing for us to grow used to seeing.

It's actually an amazing thing that our eyes do: learn to work with whatever light they've been given.  They find light in the smallest instance and use it to show us the world around us.  Imperfectly, but that's true even in the blazing light of day.  No matter how terrible the world seems, we as humans are programed to find the light.  To work with what light we can.  To see the world as much as possible even in the darkness.

Our sin comes from forgetting that the world could be better -- not from failing to love the light.

"God's Desires"

Saturday, March 29, 2014

The reflection booklet comes just short, today, of pointing out that when God explains that He wants not burnt offerings and sacrifices but love and knowledge of God, He's being somewhat coy.  Love is measured in sacrifice -- Jesus's self-sacrifice was the ultimate sign of God's love for us.  It's the foundation of all of our knowledge of God and of our love for Him.

It's a good thing to remember in Lent.  That even when it seems arbitrary (no meat on Fridays) or self-imposed (Lenten observances): sacrifices big and small show love.  They are signs and measurements of love.

I read recently that how much you love someone is what you are willing to give up or do for them without that person ever knowing that you did so.  So it's not for glory or gratitude or any desire to manipulate them into feeling more or less.  It's just a sacrifice you are willing to make for no return.  It's just a measure of your willingness to put their needs and desires above your own.

So what God really means is not that He doesn't value sacrifice but that He doesn't value sacrifice in itself.  It is not that God feels strongly about the consumption of meat on Fridays.  He cares for our signs and shows and sacrifices only in how they measure real cost.  Only in the love that they show.  Only that they are done in the name of love.

It's not just intention over action, although there is some of that.  It's about content over form and finding something truly meaningful to do rather than a way to show your sacrifice and love.  Being willing to sacrifice even when no one is looking.  Yes, God always is, but could you do it even if He weren't?  Could you love when no one is watching?  Would you love differently, sacrifice differently, if no one would ever know?  Not even God?

Real sacrifice is private and painful and done from a place of love -- not pride or guilt or desire to please and change.  It's love, measured and weighed and then given freely.

"God's Kingdom: Near or Far?"

Friday, March 28, 2014

I admit to not absorbing too much this week, because the verse that introduces the reflection was used at my father’s rosary.  I almost wrote “death rosary”, but that seemed morbid.  Then I worried that people who haven’t been through a Catholic mourning process wouldn’t know the significance.

Monsignor Jamail gave a homily that has stuck with me (not just because he got my name wrong).  Not even because that was my job – to pick the readings for the funeral and the service the night before.  It was perfect for my dad – a lawyer who understand the law of compassion and faithfulness.  Who thinks of others always.  The homily ended, “And Tom, you are not far from the Kingdom of God.”

Of course, I’ve written on this blog that the Kingdom of God is here.  That we are living in the Kingdom of God.  It’s not some magical thing that will come down and be delivered to us all in one piece someday.  It’s something we build in the now.

Another story I am rereading has a passage where two characters think on the possibilities of the Space Program.  One turns to the other and says (paraphrase) ‘Sometimes when this world is unusually hateful, I think that perhaps there was some other place where I ought to have been.  I don’t know how I would find the place, and I can’t imagine it exists, but the universe is so very wide…so I wonder, if only I weren’t so far away…”

The other character eventually responds that you can’t just leave your home planet while it has terrible, hellish places on it.  You have to stay and fight.

I think that’s what really sets how close or far you think the Kingdom of Heaven is.  Do you think of it as some faraway place that is not so hateful – that if you could only reach, you could rest and find peace and belonging?  If so, longing for it and preparing for it take up your life.  And my father believed that.  He believed that “the purpose of life on Earth is to make oneself worthy of eternal life with God”.  Direct quote this time.  It led him to do a lot of good and continually make himself a better person.

But I think that I believe that you have to stay and fight.  I believe that we must build the Kingdom of God here on Earth – that that is the purpose of life on Earth.  That we must fight to bring about that peaceful, loving world we long for.  The advantage is, we can take action to get there right now.  Which is both wonderful and terrifying.

I suppose either way it could seem far away – but you’ve got to like the process of getting there in the second option better.

The Shema

Thursday, March 27, 2014

Despite a strong and timely offering from the reflection booklet (even mentioned Mark Twain!), I am again going to let tonight's Bible study reflection supersede the booklet.

I was very tired today and almost didn't go to Bible study, but I realized that I simply HAD to see what Jim Cavis was going to say about Samson and Delilah.  I have strong feelings, as my few long time readers know all too well, about the story of Samson and Delilah.  Cavis made the best case yet for a story -- even as a parable -- that seems to essentially have the moral "Don't trust women/outsiders!"

Cavis points out that the seven-fold story of Judges is of forgetting God's graces, not passing on God's promise and love.  Generational slip of the promise of Abraham.  Perhaps that's what really set the first three founders apart -- Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.  Maybe it was passing it on so strongly to the next generation such that they were all notable followers of God.

Again and again, the Israelites are drawn into the pagan world, corrupted slowly by the influences of others, and they bend their morals and principles and lose what was their strength -- God's favor and protection.  They fail to trust.  So they are bound (chained) and then, they pray in despair and God saves them.

I'll give them that moral.  My own interpretation is closer to the idea that the point of the story is not anything with Delilah.  She was just how Sampson was brought to a low place.  That not cutting the hair -- although a real religious custom -- was, in some ways, just as arbitrary as all the lies he told her based on magical superstitions of the time.  It was a sign and symbol of Sampson's bond with God -- not the real "source of his strength" like we think of super heroes with green lanterns or something.

The point was calling out to God even when it was hard.  When suddenly you weren't blessed with all of the strength and superiority.  When you weren't above the fray, in so many ways.  When the world came crashing in -- do you still know that you are loved and blessed by God?  Do you realize that His strength is still with you?  When it comes in difficulty, do you remember that it is still grace?

Which is a very New Testament interpretation.  As the women of the Bible study pointed out, we are in the Old Testament, which is a very different story.

We spent a lot of time trying to reconcile God's orders to destroy entire towns and kill unbelievers.  It seemed like everything that could go wrong with religion.  I found myself surprisingly reconciled to it -- in pieces.  It's a story with a religious moral, not an in-the-moment historical account.  It's not telling you all the circumstances, just framing what happened to teach a spiritual truth about not letting true worship of God become absorbed in the idols of the moment.  I'll give them that.

But the difference between the Testaments is something worth remembering. Because I still, for our world, prefer my interpretation of the story.  It's one of a compassionate, loving, forgiving God who is seeking us so desperately and constantly.  Especially when you believe that all religions are different Faces of God, it can be hard to take the Old Testament way.

But Joshua and Judges can be such a sharp reminder of just how hard and terrible and awful it was when God used us humans as his Morality Enforcers.  When He spoke to men and told them to fix the world, and we didn't have the stomach to do it.  We didn't have the taste for bathing in the blood of the sinners or burning their towns.  I wonder if it even felt sacrilegious to break their idols.

That's something I think a lot of people of faith would do well to remember.  We neither liked nor were good at being the Morality Enforcers.  When Jesus came, He set us free from that as well.  Now we extend forgiveness and compassion and gentle correction.  Now we share the Good News, not the blunt instrument.

That's where a very vocal minority of my religion is going so very wrong.  Don't you remember?  Don't you remember that we were terrible at that job?  Don't you remember how awful it was for everyone, including God?  Don't you remember that Jesus's promise was that this was no longer necessary?

This may sound, for a moment, like a digression, but another element of tonight's discussion was the Shema.  The Shema is a prayer that many Jewish people say in the morning and the evening, based on Deuteronomy 6:4-9.

"Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord; and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.  And these words which I command you this day shall be upon your heart; and you shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. And you shall bind as a sign upon your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes.  And you shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates."

It made me think about my cross and how I stopped wearing it every day and then practically at all.  It made me think about every so often I can really tell.  I can really tell that I am not wearing it -- or occasionally when I remember times that I knew it absolutely.  When it reminded people daily of my beliefs.  When it gave me the opportunity, every day, to present a loving, compassionate view of Christianity.

It was only later when I got home that I remembered the main reason I stopped.  It wasn't the bead falling off -- although that didn't help.  It's a reversible beaded cross so I could have worn the other side facing out.  No, I stopped because one too many people who saw the cross assumed that that meant that I shared their homophobic bigotry.  Because I never knew what to say to those people and always felt that telling them about my bisexuality would be just a weapon.  Because I couldn't take another tirade against my own sexuality delivered with a nod and a wink, as if expecting me to go along with it.

And tonight it made me remember how very, very weird I felt when I heard an NPR piece on the life and death of Paul Walker, the head of the Westboro Baptist Church.  Because before he became the man who pickets the funerals of fallen heroes or victims of great tragedies, he was on the frontline of the fight for civil rights.  And...it's always so complicated when people aren't simple.  When people are more than one thing.

But maybe it was the same thing that drove him.  Maybe he is just the extreme representation of the good and the bad side of trying to be the Moral Enforcer.  Like the Levites killing everyone who wouldn't turn away from the Golden Calf and being rewarded with the priesthood.  Or perhaps removed from the tribes?

He believed, in both cases, that he knew what was right.  And he set out to change the world until it was right, by any means necessary.

I'm not defending him -- mostly -- because his methods were abhorrent and his second message was filled with more hate than perhaps he had the self-awareness to comprehend.

But perhaps the real lesson of his life is to remember that we are not living in the world of the Old Testament anymore.  Even if you feel compelled to follow the role of Moral Enforcer -- which is Old Testament, not New -- then you must remember that we are no longer the religion of zero tolerance and salting the ground of the fallen city.  Everything you do in the service of God must be done with compassion and love for your fellow man.  We don't go around burning towns anymore.  Now we lay down our lives for our brothers and our enemies alike.

Now we love, not judge.

"Ave Maria"

Tuesday, March 25, 2014

The reflection book is back on form today with the Annunciation.  As if to address what I wrote (somewhat wildly and randomly) yesterday, the reflection book points out Mary's odd position of knowing and yet not knowing -- not knowing what was in store or how it would come to be even when the angel told her directly, but yet knowing that God was within her and would use her as His tool to bring about salvation for all mankind.

She knew the deeper truth.  I imagine there were days where it felt like God could have at least taken a glance at the practical details.  Perhaps he could have had Gabriel explain a little better what was in store for her and how He wanted her to navigate it.

She wasn't given a roadmap, for all she was told more specifics than most of us get.  Even Mary didn't get to know exactly what to do and how to do it and what was in store.  She knew only what I professed yesterday I have always been blessed to know -- whatever comes, God is with me.  God is within me.  God is reaching out to save me, every minute of my life.  God will use me to the extent I allow him to, and my life will be blessed to the same degree.

She knew that Grace would pour through her life.

And so do I.

The next time I whine about not knowing what I will do with my life or what God wants from me, I hope I have the grace to remember that not even Mary knew all of that.  She knew only what the Gift of Certainty has brought me. God is with me and in me and working through me.  Come what may.

Mary, Our Mother, remind me when I threaten to forget and fall.  Help me to follow your example.

"Good and Courageous Evangelists"

Monday, March 24, 2014

As I read the reflection today, I was already trying to figure out why it didn't speak to me the way all the others have so far -- challenging me and forcing me to rethink old, familiar ideas about God and my religious path.

I was all ready to blame the inexplicable back pain that brought me to the ground at least twice today and was only banished with ibuprofen PLUS two glasses of wine -- two more than I usually have on a school night.  That'd be enough to throw anybody off even a couple hours later, I thought.

Then I wondered -- is this a well-timed message?  I have been dealing with anger at the meaninglessness of death and perhaps even unresolved "Why, God?" issues from seven years ago.  Issues not helped by the shocking episode of The Good Wife, which I apparently signed on to with just enough time to fully catch up and appreciate pseudo-live the moment when they pulled the rug out from under us.

Which is how I felt -- but only ever so briefly.  Long enough to remind me that I do believe, at least.

I thought about how I was afraid that my faith would prove a casualty of losing Dad so senselessly.  Of how I was afraid to pray for his healing because I already knew God would say no, and I was afraid that it would break my heart if God said no or -- even worse -- the certain faith that has blessed all of my life.  I remember my uncle with his head head in his hands, perhaps even asking me not just while I was present, what God could have been thinking.  He was doing so much good, he could have done so much more, how could this be the plan?

I've been growing increasingly angry -- with one thing and a hundred others -- about issues I thought I had dealt with, but perhaps ALL of it can be answered by remembering what I am supposed to have always known -- what I have always taken it for granted that I have known.  What I have never had to examine and question and realize or even hold to particularly tight except maybe this once.

I know God loves me.  I know He loves me unconditionally.  I feel it all the time.

I ended up losing my faith in the power of prayer in my father's death precisely BECAUSE, I think, my faith in the basic premise is unshakable.  It's the only explanation I could come up with -- prayer doesn't work like that.  If you tilt your head and squint, you can just about see how it IS kind of tacky and disrespectful even if it seems like a straightforward request that would increase the amount of good in the world.  Why is your pain, your issue, so special that He should overturn the natural laws of the beautiful universe He made for you?

Why can't you wait for heaven for perfection?

But that does make it harder to explain -- to explain that I've always felt taken care of and loved by God.  That I've never really doubted because it's just so obvious all around me, and how can I thank Him for all the tiny little ways He's taken care of me but not blame Him for the big bad scary ones?  Because I can see the pattern.  Because it's somehow even more beautiful that He set up the universe and gave it a push and arranged it so that dominoes would eventually fall for me in this tiny way. Surely that's not all He had the dominoes do, but I was part of the consideration of the infinite in this small way.

I don't know what else the dominoes are doing.  And I try to trust that He does even when it seems like the dominoes have really taken a wrong turn.  It's harder, God knows only too well, He's listened to me whine about it.  But my faith changed shape when my father died.  I lost a lot of my faith in prayer and pretty much everything I believed about the nature of our relationship with God changed radically.

But there was one thing I always knew, that today my reflection book asks me to wonder why I don't trust instinctively.

It must be so hard out there, in this cruel world, without what I've called the Gift of Certainty.  Without always knowing, unassailably, that God loves us, every one.

One little moment in an unexpectedly hard day, another proof that God took a split second of time in His creation to comfort me on this day by setting up the dominoes to fall for billions of years just right.  Thank You.

"Evangelization: New and Old"

Sunday, March 23, 2014

It seems this week the uncannily aimed reflection book is going to be challenging my approach to evangelization.  Which, I admit, is the one element of the gospel of the Samaritan Woman at the Well that I've barely covered despite exhaustively writing about just about everything else.  (Nice homily, Father Shane, that was also a slightly new angle for me, but I like it!)

I went through a phase when I was a teenager when I read some obnoxious books (for the record, the Left Behind series pairs BADLY with The Fountainhead) and became what I fear was an obnoxious person.  I went to a Jewish friend's house and tried to convert them.  Yeah.

The family, luckily, received this with kindness and looks on it as an act of love.  I did mean it that way, and even in my fervor I acted out of caring and love and fear for salvation.

But as I grew up and shook off the horrifying sanctimony of the Left Behind branch of end times nonsense and jettisoned the few Ayn Rand principals I hadn't managed to mangle in my secretly leftie heart into something I now realize what entirely different than what she was trying to say, I came to believe that there's just no way that God would damn nice people seeking Him through a religion they grew up in rather than Christianity.  It was actually my sister who planted the earworm that eventually bore that fruit.

I have explained before, probably not as well as I think I have, that I believe that all religions show a face of God exactly BECAUSE I believe that the Christian religion is true (or at least truest, it's a human institution at this point, after all, staring down the face of the Infinite).  The God of Love in the Bible is doing everything EVERYTHING to reach us, just sneaking and powing and changing His very nature to be more like us in order to meet each of us on the level that we will receive Him.  Of course He sets up all different kinds of paths to spiritual oneness with Him.

I imagine it's harder without the Eucharist, but then I think that about Protestants too.  I admire people of faith even more when they don't believe that they can go to heaven every Sunday at Mass.  For staying strong and true without that particularly remarkable grace.

That makes evangelization tricky, though.  Yes, I suppose we could all target the atheists, but I've even found in them souls who are seeking God through that ironic lens.  I told my best friend, an atheist, that I respond to her as a woman of faith: someone who has a text they trust to contain answers or at least a pathway to enlightenment, she cares about doing right, she spends time thinking about all of the important questions, and she has a moral code that she respectfully believes everyone would be better off if they followed.

Perhaps that's what evangelization can be for someone like me then -- respectfully trying to help people make it easier on themselves.  The go-to answer for people like me is to be an Example out in the world, but that's a lot of pressure for someone who hates the idea of purity.

What I could be instead is someone who tries to help people find God in whatever way they already know to find Him.  After all, if God doesn't mind meeting us through any avenue we listen to, then why should I be picky about what conduit they choose?  My job is just to help them tune in, whatever way I can.

"Logic and Affectivity: Paths of Knowledge"

Saturday, March 22, 2014

Today's reflection makes a case for a balance between -- or perhaps something more complicated -- logic and affection, reason and emotion.

It seems like a good goal to keep a balance between these two opposites, to judge and choose based on logic and the head versus deciding with the heart.

But perhaps this term "balance" prejudices us toward the higher good: letting our emotions inform our logic and our logic guide our emotions.  The idea of balance acknowledges that there is a problem with too pure an expression of either, but rather than thinking of them as opposites, why should we not think of them as partners?

We feel for someone deeply, and it is right to act on that, but we should welcome logic into the equation so that we can do good cleverly.  So that we do more good than harm rather than blundering in in our eagerness to feel relief from the painful emotions in our hearts.

We might even be at our best selves when we are capable of deciding, calmly and without fear or anger or even individual sympathy, the best path for all -- however painful to ourselves and perhaps even to others.  But our judgment of the best path will undoubtedly be founded on our emotional empathy, or it is little more than rationalization and self-righteousness.  Or worse -- a mind game.

There's nothing wrong with acting from emotion, as long as you are thinking through the actual consequences of your actions.  There's nothing wrong with deciding what the great good for all is rationally and calmly, as long as you evaluated the greatest good with compassion and love.

I've had two recent events in my life that provoked a severe emotional response -- really three, if you count one that's been building for awhile -- that I won't go into because they are private matters that do not only concern me.  The first flood of response is emotional, but I am glad that I had the time to reflect and apply logic in the scenarios (for the most part).  Not because it balanced my emotional response, but because it informed it.  Because it partnered it.  Not control and not balance -- partnership.

Lessons I hope I remember next time, when their may not be so much time to reflect and plan.

"Silver: Twenty, Thirty Pieces"

Friday, March 21, 2014

More tales from a previous Bible study -- this one on Joseph and his brothers, who were going to kill him but instead sold him into slavery.  I had been working up a theory that perhaps these betrayals, these evil deeds, were necessary for salvation at times.  That God needs -- or at least can use -- the wicked things we do for good.  After all, didn't it end better for everyone -- literally thousands of people -- that Joseph was sold into slavery by his loved ones?

But then -- if Joseph had gone to Egypt to be of use another way, if, say his reputation as a Reader of Dreams and a Seer of Visions had spread to Pharoah's palace and he had been officially sent for to interpret the dream, perhaps bargaining for food to feed his family in Canaan in return for helping out Egypt in its time of need -- if all of that had happened instead, would the Israelites have been enslaved for centuries?

And I thought: God's will will happen.  Sometimes through our misdeeds because we are human and God cannot let those misdeeds get in the way of His plan -- but if we had acted better, would the same result have happened only, well, better?

Then I think of the theory on Judas Iscariot that I just cannot shake.

There's a term used in certain hero stories -- officially of every stripe but used most explicitly in science fiction and fantasy stories where our modern hero stories live -- referred to as Who You Are in the Dark.  It's when the hero faces a choice with no one to see -- heroes so often have to deal with the spotlight, but then the villain or just Life brings them to a moment of true privacy, where they have to choose to do right at great personal cost or wrong, often for personal game, secure in the knowledge that no one will ever have to know.  It won't hurt their fame and reputation, and it won't have to change their lives.

The most common response to this challenge is, "I'll know!" and a defiant refusal to do evil.

The more subtle and complicated and heartbreaking ones are where not only will no one ever know that the hero chose to do good even in the dark, with no one watching, but they will THINK that the hero was the villain.  Jamie Lannister killed Mad King Aerys to save the city, for example.

You can probably see where I'm going with this.  Especially with the way the Last Supper conversation goes, how no one goes after him even after the reveal that goes down halfway through, I sometimes wonder if Judas Iscariot is the ultimate example of willing to be a hero in the dark -- to let history villify his name as the worst of traitors and scum, so that Jesus Christ could save us all.

It would mean he would have been in on the plan or at least trying to force Jesus's hand.  It would be something impressive.

Even if it's not true, the two stories side by side in the readings today illustrate an important truth it can be all too easy to lose sight of especially in our decreasingly private world: there is an important difference between loving good in public and doing good in private.  You are who you are when the world's not looking, every bit as much as when they are.

The important thing is righteousness and virtue and grace -- not the public perception of it.  The importance is our faith, not the appearance of religious observance.

Idolatry

Thursday, March 20, 2014

3-20-14

The 20th is my favorite day of the month to write down.

Today I'm going to take a break from the reflection booklet reflections and share an insight from the Bible Study tonight.  It's "A Quick Journey Through the Bible" and today's session focused on Exodus and Moses.

What really struck me in a new way was the golden calf story.  Well, that and the way the plagues take down the Egyptian deities in a beautiful way.

Here's what I wrote down the moment it was over:

The difference between idolatry and just another religion -- which I have always believed is just another Face of God, another channel of His grace in the world -- is that idolatry is worshipping a god that you have made with your own hands -- and for your own purposes.

You're not listening, you're controlling.  Idolatry is creation not in service of something larger but to make grace something smaller and tangible and limited.  Grace and true religion are about reaching for something higher.

That's the real sin of the gold calf -- making something with your own hands and then saying "That is the god that did all of those wonders, and don't you see?  We can control it.  WE are the ones who built it.  WE with our prayers give IT life and power."  It is saying "Thanks, God, but we'll take it from here." once the trouble in Egypt has passed.

It's patently ridiculous -- to cede your sovereignty and invest your soul into something that you have created.  It's an attempt to make the divine smaller.  You might as well be writing vampire fiction -- turning the immortals into former humans.

It's so much easier to fathom than the infinite becoming merely human.

But guess which one is real love?

"Attentiveness/Responsiveness"

Wednesday, March 19, 2014

First real quibble with the reflection book: do not make light of ADD to turn it into a "lesson", okay?  "Why is attention deficit disorder a serious issue?"  You imply the answer is because of your previous meditation on the importance of attention and then RESPONDING to the message you receive.  No, the answer to that question is because it is a potentially serious handicap and behavioral disorder that is, in most cases, quite treatable but often misunderstood and stigmatized or made light of as a result.

Now, back to your other good points today:

The reflection quoted Jose Ortega y Gasset: "Tell me what you pay attention to, and I will tell you who you are."  That is some profound stuff right there -- all the moreso for being an obvious truth we don't like to face.  I think most of us would like to think we are who we are on our best days -- that we take seriously the news in the Washington Post and know to take John Stewart with a grain of salt, to name one of mine.  But which do I turn to (semi) daily?

I would like to think I am smart and savvy and study the Bible, but I spend much more time on TV and science fiction.  I have read a lot this week, but none of it for the Bible study group meeting tomorrow.  Perhaps that's why God has to speak to me through these things -- these things I devour and hate Lent for taking away from me even in part.

But the second part of the reflection feels even more pertinent to me right now.  I recently felt a call deep in my heart -- I won't say soul, because while I believe it comes from God, it's not a religious one in particular.  I feel as if someone put a magnet behind my heart and is holding the other half toward me.  I NEED to run toward it.

It's frightening, really, because I have something worth casting the rest off for.  I have something I WANT in a long-term sense.  Something I would happily devote my life to, even if it didn't allow me to live in comfort or even stability.  Something I could do and do well and want desperately.

Will I have the courage to respond with bravery?  And will I listen when God calls with His take on this mission?  Will I ever listen to God's call with the clarity and purpose I feel about this?

I fear the answer at the moment, which isn't a good sign.

"White Wool, White Snow"

Tuesday, March 18, 2014

Today is the verse about your sins as red as crimson becoming as white as snow in God's forgiveness.

And I can't help thinking that here may be something to think about when I'm all bothered about "purity" and living up to "Katherine" meaning "pure."  Because it's quite natural for people in Biblical times to think of "white" as the absence of color and sin.  The absence of anything marring the white, before anything happened to it or was done with it.

But white's not like that.  White isn't nothing -- new and bright and clean.  White is all the colors.  White is everyone and everything working in tandem -- not the scarlet colors going off by themselves to decide that they are more important and noteworthy and trying to kick all the others colors out so that they can be the ones to shine.

And less politically, more individually, this is how forgiveness works.  It's not magic taking away the red that was spilled on the white.  It's God showing you how to re-integrate all of your other colors so that you are once again a sum of the whole, you are once again part of the Body of Christ -- all the colors coming together to form white.

Or even more individually, perhaps just all the parts of you coming back into alignment to work together to be your best self, through God.  Grace maintaining the balance so that your red never shines through and wrecks violence through anger or green gets uppity and throws a jealous fit or blue gets so sad that you stop seeing other people's pain for obsession with your own.

You are in balance with yourself and with everyone around you -- then you are white.  It's a process, it's work to get to white.  And yes, to keep everything white once you're there, but it's not a free gift to arrive in the world white and have to protect it from stain forever and forever.  It's work to become all of the colors in alignment and work to maintain it once you're there.

That's so much more worthwhile -- and encouraging.

It's also something that we can't do without God.  And it's beautiful.

"God: Great and Awesome"

Monday, March 17, 2014

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

I think that this reflection book is producing poorer blog reflections but perhaps more change in my own life -- which makes a kind of sense.  When I'm actually thinking through a new challenge to the way I see my faith, I am bound to be less eloquent then when I am talking about a concept where I feel myself on solid ground.  Of course, that's where growth happens -- in the incoherent mass of words.

My best friend and I talked about it once or twice -- mostly in comparison to her husband, who rarely wades into an argument (civil, friendly, philosophical, or angry bickering) but when he does, he always easily outmatches us.  She realized that her husband only argues when he has already figured everything out from every direction to his satisfaction.  She and I, in contrast, use the argument to DO that, to get to that place.  So you can't argue with him.

If some of the better entries on this site are Cameron arguing, this Lenten season has been me arguing to figure things out.

Today seemed the appropriate place to talk about it because for the first time it felt like familiar, well-trodden territory for me.  It's about the awesomeness of God and the insufficiency of any of the words we have to wrap around that.  I think I've said on here (it's actually a quote) that there are places words don't go -- that they're not meant to go.  The truth is, really, that words can only take you so far.

I adore words.  I almost said I worship words, and that might be nearer the truth.  If I am in danger of an idolatry, it may well be words.  So it is humbling for me to realize, again and again, that with words I will never do more than scratch the surface of the truth of God.  We who try keep smacking up against the same wall.  If you hit that wall too many times, you end up just sounding crazy.

You end up like the Battlestar Galactica hybrids (sorry, science fiction is one of my mirrors into the world and religion and even God) -- every word you say is precious and worth unwrapping, heavy with meaning and depth and poetry, and you babble it a mile a minute because you know that even though laden words cannot carry enough.  You try too hard, you forget that no one can hear you when you talk that fast and that crazy all at once.

But words can tell us a story that helps us glimpse the truth, and we can feel it, every so often, when we really look around and see -- really see, perhaps for the first time -- how elaborately beautiful our world is.  How wonderfully made is this paradise He has given us.  The words that unlock the door to that unknowable place -- for me the biggest key has been the Infinite God becoming Finite Man out of love for us.  I-- that's where my words stop.  I've tried to wrap more words around that until I feel myself going into wild mystic territory and I stop.  Because even my thoughts stop.  There's just a block over that.  I can't even.  It is too much love, too much wonder, too much joy, too much...everything.

God is good beyond our capacity to recognize it or even conceptualize it as a possibility.  We can no more see in twelve dimensions than we can use our words to reach the place where we would know God.

That's okay.  Sometimes all you need is a key.

"I Am, I See"

Sunday, March 16, 2014

Today's Gospel is one of my favorite of the Bible stories: the Transfiguration.  The reflection today is all about seeing and finally knowing the truth.  The question it poses is how and when we listen.

Years ago on this very Sunday in Lent, I gave a talk at a retreat on this theme -- I compared leaving the retreat to walking back down the mountain after all that you'd seen.

I've been really grateful, in my life of faith, that God has spoken to me so often through things that I happen upon or stories and shows that I have loved and devoured.  And I do devour stories -- I'm ravenous for them.  I've always been grateful that God was willing to speak to me through all of these far flung interests and random bits of wisdom floating through the world.  I've been touched by the grace of showing me the truth where I was searching already for something else.

But I have also recently been reminded how important it is to have a moment of quiet now and again -- to sit and give God time to sort through all the noise and talk to me in more than clever, hidden hints.  To let the noise in my head dissipate and realize why I am doing things and think through if it's right to be doing them.

To listen for that still, small voice that can lead me to God.  He speaks so often when I do take a moment in silence.  Perhaps because He knows that I will wander off again so soon.

People have often talked about my extreme focus when I am engaged in a task.  Truth be told, that's not  how it feels to me.  The experience of even my focused moments feels like I'm jumping about, and half of my work time is just trying to convince myself not to chase any of the rabbits down their holes but keep to what I am working on.  Even more so in my prayer life, where it can sometimes be hard to know when a train of thought is leading away from prayer since all things glorify God and all my troubles are things I would like to lay before God.

Even Peter couldn't stay easily focused on the Transfiguration and was already building temples in his head (and probably thinking which of Jesus's followers had the cash to fund them, who owned the land, etc.).  We don't have the focus we should.  So we need time in the quiet.

I don't believe in meditating, really.  I can imagine it is nice if you can do it -- really clear your mind of all your buzzing thoughts.  To me, it just seems like trying to shut everything down in the hopes of restarting it.  It's not relaxation that my mind needs -- it's drive and focus.  The trick is: that's easier in the quiet too.

It's something as small as this: I recently realized that by playing music while I was in the shower, I had deprived myself of the stable "quiet thinking time" in my daily life.  You know, that time I rarely cut out and always do -- whether it's deep thoughts, prayerful thinking, or just nonsense, I took that time to rest.  Now I'm listening to music.  It's not a big change, but I found myself grateful to have the quiet back.

It's easy to think it'd be boring and find some way -- any way -- to fill the quiet.  But I'm trying to learn, over this Lenten season, to leave it be.  To let there be quiet.

"The Mystery of Love"

Saturday, March 15, 2014

Today's reflection is about the difficulty and the duty of loving others -- all others, not just those we naturally respect and like.

When I was young, I loved the works of an author I have since decidedly cooled on (his later works in particular got kinda nuts), but there is one truth he wrote that I still find profound: you can't really know someone, as they know themselves, and not love them as they love themselves.

To that end, God's omniscience is related to His ability to be All-Loving.  Of course, I think that might be putting things in reverse.  God is Love, and everything He knows about us doesn't stop that.  It is we humans who have to go in the opposite direction -- from knowing to loving.

It's easy to see how too much knowledge of a person could, in fact, make it harder to love them.  But then I think about the way my father taught me that a lawyer must approach the truth.  He said that the person who won the case, every time, was the person who knew the most about it -- because there were no true facts that could really hurt you.  You just had to find a way to turn them to your advantage.

Because there's always a truth under the most obvious one and even a truth under that.  Not an excuse -- not a reason we should discount harm done by someone -- simply a thing to know about them that would make them still worth loving.  Or would show us that we are not immune to their foibles.  To recognize, even in the worst crimes, the seed of its cause that we recognize in ourselves.

The more we know about a person, the more kinship we feel with them.  We love others the more we know them because we are imperfect ourselves, and we know their struggles and loves in that way.  God loves us despite what He knows of us -- and perhaps because He knows us so perfectly.

It is hard to see at times, but that is our duty as Christians.  That is why we have to do it.  If it were easy to love those who are broken and angry and snapping at the world in fear and pain, then we would not need strength and grace to do it.  And they would not need our love so very much.

"God's Great Kingdom"

Friday, March 14, 2014

3-14-14!  Actually this time!

I'm trying to figure out, actually, how the title relates to the message this time.  The message today is about how our righteousness must surpass that of the scribes and the pharisees and...oh wait, I think I see it.

The reflection talks about being people of "life and not death, love and mercy, truth and joy".  To be doers of active good.  The Bible verse warns against Official Morality or what I think of as Checklist Morality -- I have not done A, B, and C, therefore I am a good person even if I secretly think the world revolves around me and can't be bothered to help my fellow man.  Or even, I care about my fellow man in a general, abstract way, so it doesn't matter if I'm totally rude to this random person having a bad day.

Especially when you sit in judgment on people who do A, B, and C while thinking yourself righteous...

Actually, the term "self-righteous" might be the best descriptor of a lousy phenomenon in human behavior ever.  I've always looked at is a shorthand for "self-proclaimed righteous" but it's more than that.  It's not just assuming the moral stance and declaring yourself to be so awesome and in the right -- it's determining your own righteousness based on rules you made up in your head to keep yourself from having to change your life.

Yes, I know, I started this Lenten journey talking about letting someone else determine your morality for you being a form of laziness.  But there's a difference between doing the hard work of figuring out what's right and wrong and deciding that you will define righteousness or the more simple "good person" as "someone just like me, who only has small flaws, like mine."

I have a theory on the world that most people I have told about it find weird:

There are two kinds of people in this world:

People who like to think of themselves as good people,

And those who are willing to work at it.

I sometimes finish it by reminding myself not to judge someone in the latter category because they have further to go than I do in coming to that place.  But that's really what I think the defining difference is: whether you're willing to self-examine and change and work at being a good person.  Whether you're willing to work at being a good person all the time, especially when it's inconvenient or difficult to figure out, or you are tired and cranky and just want a break.

When you don't take excuses but cop to your mistakes.  When you are righteous, by your own moral code, yes, but not self-designated righteous.  Not a kind of righteous that means little outside of your own head.  When you live by a code even when it takes work.  Work that you don't get credit for.

When you stop keeping score and realize that every moment counts on its own, individually, for whether you acted righteously.  Whether you were righteous in that moment.  You don't just have to stay even or slightly above even in the good/bad you bring to the world.  You don't "balance out" to a righteous person.  In each moment, you are or you aren't.  You make that choice, and you own each and every one -- failures and successes, to grow and change and work at being righteous constantly.

You are righteous if you never rest on the laurels of it.

Important Matters

Thursday, March 14, 2014

3-14-14.  I like dates like that.

Today was about human loneliness and whether or not we had people with whom we can discuss important matters.  The Bible verse was Esther asking for God’s strength and grace because she was all alone and “taking my life in my hand.”

We’re more used to the phrase being about putting your life in someone else’s hands, which should feel scarier.  Holding someone else’s life in our hands might feel scarier – probably depends on how capable you feel.

But what Esther is describing is something that only God can help us with and perhaps that only God can really share with us: taking our lives into our own hands.  Acting, working, living, risking, our own lives.  Taking our comfortable lives as the queen consort in our hands in order to do good.

This past weekend, someone told me about a project, and it is only today that I realized why ever since I have been filled with fire and dread.  Because I have found, at last, a project that I know I want to spend my life doing.  I have found it.  This is what I want.  To work on this project.  I want it to start right away, and I don’t want to give it up until I’m dead.  I want it to be mine.

Not exclusively or anything, but I have found the thing that I want desperately to be a part of.  Enough to risk and sacrifice and break down my life to pick up and move to do.  Without really hesitating.  All the doubt and hesitation is me forcing myself to do it right – not a doubt about what I want to be doing.

God is speaking through this book, reminding me to keep Him a part of the conversation and prompting the epiphany between it and an old story I’m rereading this evening.  God truly is amazing – that He can use both together to comfort me and help guide me.

I don’t know how the reflection book knew, but I did feel dreadfully lonely tonight.  I drove around for awhile when I stopped by the house and saw that Daniel wasn’t home.  I wandered around, thinking how very dull I must be that I can’t even think of anything I’d like to do at this hour – which was only 8 p.m. except stop at the DQ on the way home.

Perhaps that’s the real moment when God gives us purpose – or perhaps the place from which we are most able to see it.  Other people’s needs, other people’s wonderful community – they can obscure it.  Visionaries with pure, simple callings had to take time away from the community, however supportive, to listen and get their heads straight.  To put their lives back in their hands.

Perhaps that is the gift of loneliness – purpose.  Perhaps it is the quiet where grace can shout rather than subtly suggest.  Perhaps loneliness, too, is holy.  Perhaps it makes us feel braver and stronger or just takes away the things that would keep us from acting, making our purpose clearer and easier to follow through.

"An Evil Generation"

Wednesday, March 12, 2014

I always worry about religious meditations on evil.  It's probably the lingering bad taste in my mouth from St. Francis in Staunton -- the homily on which I walked out.  (The first, there have been two.)  And I've written before about my suspicion of the "frog in boiling water" parable (not one of Jesus's).

But the reflection book did pretty well staying away from moral denouncements, just invited us to examine our world for the modern temptations and tendencies toward evil.

What I really found interesting was the definition of evil (thrown in haphazardly) as "the opposite of good".  Not an entity onto itself, just the absence and opponent of good.  No one really sets out deliberately to be evil.  Villainy is not an aspect people pursue intentionally.  There's a great quote about how no one ever saw themselves as the villain.  Alan Rickman explained it beautifully and simply: when asked what it was like to always play the villain, he replied simply that he has never played a villain.  No one ever casts themselves as the villain.

But we do evil when we do the opposite of good.  It's not about our intentions -- the road to hell is paved with good intentions, after all -- but whether we do good in the world or the opposite of good.  In big and small ways, do we add to the good of the world, do we take concise, concrete actions that effect good in the world?  Or do we not?  Do we do the opposite, by doing nothing or by doing what we justify as a kind of good?

I'm drawn again back to the poster I made for my classroom: We are judged by our actions, not our intentions.  That's all very well and good, that you had good intentions, but did you do good in the world?

A question we should ask ourselves every day.

"The Mystery of Prayer"

Tuesday, March 11, 2014

The first real stumbling block, in my opinion, for this reflection book.

You know, I didn't really know just how hollow the "it's God's plan" argument can ring with an unanswered prayer until I heard it echoed by my 8th grade class.  It felt like a small piece of what atheists must feel -- the ones who turn in anger from the idea of a kind and loving God who would let the Holocaust happen.  I forget quite how it came up, and if anyone at my school is reading this: don't worry, I don't think I betrayed my feelings to the students.

But I just...it broke something in me to hear this young, for the most part wonderful young people of faith calling the Holocaust part of God's plan.  A few of them had odd little theories about, say, the Holocaust being a remembrance and warning that will keep us from doing this when we have more efficient methods of destruction at our disposal, which is interesting and inventive of them.

It's not the most personal this question has ever been.  That honor goes to my uncle, who after my father died expressed his bewilderment at God's plan.  "He was doing so much good.  I just don't understand how this could be God's plan."  My father was one of the most respected family law judges in Texas, if not the most respected.  On a daily basis, he did more good for more people than I have this entire year.  How could it be God's plan for such a man to die before his time?

I've invented little things -- perhaps some case was going to come up in a few months that would have forced him into a no win situation spiritually.  Maybe something terrible was coming down the turnpike.  Maybe maybe.  Nothing satisfactory.

But it was watching these young people who I am trying (largely against their will) to equip with tools to navigate the world around them (sometimes I just sit and think how innocent they are) spouting off these words that just felt so inadequate in the face of what we were talking about...

They don't hear it yet.  They don't hear how hollowly those words ring.  They don't hear how stupid they sound in your ears or feel on your tongue yet.  They don't...their world is simpler and ultimately fair -- you should see how they freak out if anything they think isn't "fair" and "right" happens.  Giving them half an hour over lunch of thinking even just the small world of my classroom would be unfair* unleashed a STORM.

* I explained the real lesson to them at the end of the day.

I don't have anything better to give them.  I tried to give them my tactic, but they weren't ready for the idea that prayer is for US not GOD.  That we go to church on Sunday for OURSELVES not because GOD needs it or we're doing it wrong.

It sounds self-centered if phrased the wrong way, and the book even calls it one of the pitfalls of prayer, but I believe that religion is not our gift to God but God's gift to us.  Another sign of how He loves us.  One of many ways He uses to be close to us.  To abide with us.  To comfort and exult and just be with us.  To share our lives.  Because He loves us that much.

Today has been an odd day, where I a lot is ringing hollow, but there are moments of grace everywhere.  Music lifting my spirits at last, reminders of God in this project.  A gentle redirect from above.

Prayer is one kind of grace -- a kind we can officially solicit and join.  That is the purpose of prayer.  That is the answer.

"Would Do/Should Do"

Monday, March 11, 2014

Coulda, Shoulda, Woulda.  The path to hell is paved with good intentions.

That's the general thrust of the message in today's reflection (again invoking Shakespeare, although unfortunately again less effective a quote when you know the context).

I have a sign in my classroom that says "We are judged by our ACTIONS, not our INTENTIONS" which I have used little in my classroom.  I thought I would be referring to it constantly, but I keep forgetting about it in those opportune moments.  The caption I wrote under it is, essentially, "we are not in your head."

At some point, I believe, it doesn't matter what you meant to do.  Of course, it matters for your personal salvation, for your personal beliefs and personality in general.  But you don't get to discount the effect of your actions because they had a good intention behind them.  You don't get to deny the pain you've caused.

After two months studying the bystander effect in the context of the Holocaust, I wonder if we will ever change this part of our natures.  We still stand idly by.  We still watch as things happen to others.  We still can't be bothered.  I posed what I thought was a rhetorical question to bring them slowly along to global citizenship only to flounder at the chorus of "Of course we should solve our own problems before we stop genocide abroad!"  I admit I was seriously flummoxed.  So we were right to avoid wading into World War II because of the Great Depression?  No, that's not the right tack.  "Wait, really?" No, no...

What I came up with was, "Consider this: what if their neighbors aren't capable of intervening either?  What if there is no one who can help that's close?  Then is it our responsibility?"

Unfortunately, for many students the answer still seemed to be a qualified, no longer resounding, no.

It's something you hear around the talk shows and news shows and dinner tables.  We have problems enough at home, we don't need to go looking for them.  The US has plenty to deal with on our side of the Atlantic.  True.  Heaven knows it's all too true.  But staying out of Rwanda was a horrific crime.  How long it took us to intervene in the Sudan.  Syria.

We are bystanders, by and large.  Show us a person suffering right there, near us, and we will probably help.  Tell us someone is drowning a thousand miles away and we can save them if we hand over $5, and studies show that the number of people who will help drops drastically.

It's okay to know this about ourselves.  But now that we do, now that we know we value proximity and need to see the victim to propel us to act -- let's make sure we're looking for the visceral evidence we need to take the necessary action.

"Moral Counterfeiting"

Sunday, March 9, 2014

I received an excellent compliment today.  My best friend and I went out to lunch, and she generously offered me priority to discuss my plans for the future with her.  Somewhere in the conversation, I ended up mentioning that I was sorted into Hufflepuff House by the Pottermore site.  She was surprised briefly, as was I when it first happened, but we both agreed that it made sense when you thought about it and moved on.

It was on the drive back to her house, while I was discussing the plot of a half-written verse novella, that she said in response, "I get Hufflepuff House for you now.  You are completely loyal to yourself and those you care about."  I really liked that description of it -- without all the baggage that comes with "self esteem" and "self worth" but also requiring more work.  "Loyal to yourself" -- not wanting to be anything you are not or live your life as if you do.

It's a fabulous compliment, really, and it was interesting to receive it today, because the reflection book admonished me to make sure I am not using my God-given intelligence to rationalize evil and undermine the idea of doing good.  To talk myself out of my conscience.

It's a good reminder that being loyal to yourself isn't a quality I have.  It's not a laurel I can rest on.  It's work I have to do every day.  It's why the compliment meant so much and felt so much more worthwhile a goal than the more common phrases scratching at the same idea.

Loyalty is both an active and a passive virtue, which is interesting.  It means the most when it's active -- when there are temptations and challenges to loyalty -- but it's perhaps most powerful when it's automatic.  You'd never even consider hurting someone.  You are reliable, available, in touch and on their team in a way you don't even have to talk about with someone else.  It's just there -- always.  Usually not needed in a particularly dire way, but ready when called.

I think "loyalty to your self" or perhaps even "loyalty to your soul" is perhaps a better way of thinking of "obedience" for me.  It's not about bowing to someone else's human will -- especially when so many things that the church fathers say about women horrifies me deeply -- or really about any kind of outside institution.  It's about valuing my own conscience, my own moral judgment, enough to follow it even when it's hard.  About being loyal to who I am and what I think is right, because that is more important than passing temptations.

That's what Jesus and the Devil were talking about in the desert -- loyalty to God, loyalty to His mission, and loyalty to Himself.  Remaining true to what He came to do.  It takes a lot of daily work to build up enough of a defensive wall that when the temptations come, you are able to hold the line.  Loyalty is an active and a passive virtue.  It, like your character, is made up of hundreds of small acts.  It may be proven in large acts, but that is the TEST.  It is the small, day to day actions, the time to think things through, that make you ready for when the test comes.

That keep you from moral counterfeiting -- using invention or expedience or anything really, we are so clever and resourceful, to keep you from being loyal to your own conscience, your own soul, your own relationship with God.

Entry Redacted

Saturday, March 8, 2014

I'm going to count the attempt at coming up with a profound statement I just spent twenty minutes doing as my reflection for the purposes of Lent, but I just deleted it.  It was becoming judgmental and stereotyping generations and it just did not bring out a side of me that I appreciate.

If you're wondering about the general thrust, it starts with a comparison I heard in a podcast story about our parents' generation's word for upsetting situations is "appropriate" whereas ours is "awkward."  Which struck me and the storyteller as profound -- appropriate/inappropriate comes with so much shame on both sides, while "awkward" is just a way of acknowledging everyone's feelings.

And as much as you can say anything about an entire generation of people, I think the best thing about our generation is linked to that.  Not moral judgment but acknowledging everyone's experience of the world -- the right to be annoyed and/or feel awkward, the right to be awkward and make things so.

The millenials have a lot of trumped up "problems", most of which seem to me to derive straight from the lack of jobs for us to take rather than any inherent character flaws, but we are primarily concerned with getting everyone out alive.  I mean, look at our science fiction.  We aren't (for the most part) Red Wedding-ing our casts.  We settle down on Earth with the Cylons, we have the Doctor dance in the rain because "Everybody Lives!"

And that's the only way you can be a person of faith -- not by going to that judgment place.  By trying to get the entire world out of this mess alive and well.  You care about everyone's souls, not just your own.

"Stubborn Knees; Steely Hearts"

Friday, March 7, 2014

Wow, this reflection book is really aiming right at my weak points.

Today, the reflection (if you're local, available at St. Anne's Catholic Church) used Shakespeare against me.  Yes, my man Will Shaxpar.  Additionally annoying -- I didn't recognize the quote, although since it says it's from Hamlet my instinct is to take any "wisdom" inherent in it with a grain of salt.  Seriously, read the play.  You'll never quote "To thine own self be true" or "the lady doth protest too much" again if you mean it in all sincerity.

But read one way, my entry last night was an example of stubbornness.  Refusing to bow and bend my knees.  Not willing to forfeit my own judgment and listen.

And something in me still rebels.  Unthinking obedience is worth nothing, I think to myself.  Making up excuses not to bow.

And here's the real head scratcher to meditate upon: "What is your understanding of aestheticism?  Has it more to do with compassion than a rigorous process of self-discipline?"

Usually questions like this have an obvious answer that you are supposed to ask yourself, "Is this really true of me?  I know the right answer, but am I living it?  Can I come up with examples of how I have or how I will?"

This...I don't know?  How are those two ideas set up as a dichotomy?  I can't imagine a part of my spirituality that should be divorced from either idea.  Compassion leads to self-discipline because you are thinking of others.  I have rigorously self-disciplined myself to see others more and become more compassionate to fledgling success.

In fact, a great deal of my morality is based on the idea that you must know yourself and your weak points so that you can counter them and control for them.  I am a writer, and I spend much of my time in my own world.  It is my chief flaw as a teacher, and this job has been very useful in helping me combat it.

A lot of my self-discipline is in reminding myself to see others and have compassion -- not just react as if we are all variables in a world trying to be fair or the things surrounding me are dreams no more or less real than all of things happening between my ears.  Which is a terrible, terrible way to be, and I could very easily be a monster without realizing it.  I've been accused by two very notable people of exactly that, actually.

So I use self-discipline to counter for not getting to the first step of compassion.  Once I see the problem, I am willing to help.

Oh, so maybe that's part of the obedience.

I just had a thought that didn't so much help with the meditation's question but did show me where obedience is important: in our blind spots.  To correct for our blind spots.  Rules against sex before marriage to help us correct for spiraling hormones that have the potential to break our hearts and wreck our lives.  Rules and reminders about charity so I don't forget that I should contribute to one somewhere if I don't want to give to the parish.  Correcting for my natural cheapness.  What feels like countless admonitions from every quarter that I must remember that the world is outside my head, because that is where I fail at compassion.

Obedience is not for where we are strong and sure and able to use the tools and our own hands to figure out the situation.  Obedience is to correct our weak places.  It is to force us to look at the things we don't want to acknowledge.  It is for the blind spots and the weak places and the easy sins we prefer to ignore.

Obedience is our safety net -- not our get out of jail free card, but our course correct.

"Of Great Importance: Obedience"

Thursday, March 6, 2014

I think this is going to be an excellent Lenten companion.

Today's reflection is on the importance of obedience and our all too common reaction against it.

I admit, "obedience" is one of those words like "purity" that I react against.  Regular readers will know my distaste for the idea of purity -- a virtue that only exists in the negative. You can't go out and become more pure -- it's the kind of thing that you can only lose.  Purity of intention, perhaps, but even that seems suspect to me: the road to hell is paved and all of that.

I prefer the word "clean" to "pure".  Cleaning is something active that you can do.  It acknowledges that we start with all this dust and dirt and grime and that we are constantly spilling more about -- that we need to take active steps to look around us at the accumulation and do what we can to wipe the slate clean.  It acknowledges that are lives are something we live with and in, all the time.  That our goal (except for a select and remarkable few) should not be to lock ourselves away from the world.

Perhaps then it's a matter of getting at what bothers me about obedience.  It's not the idea of doing what is difficult or of denying myself things I want in the moment for the greater good.  I would like to think I do the right thing when I actively know it.  What worries me is the image I have of obedience as unthinking.  I've often thought that people who believe the Bible is literally true and infallible are taking the easy way out.  Instead of being willing to think and work at the complex morality of our world, they just want all the answers to be written in a nice book somewhere.  Even The Book, that's not a responsible choice.

And I have a hard time with authority.  That statement alone feels both like overkill and insufficient, so I will just have to let it stand.  I am argumentative, I pick away at truths, but I am dutiful and respectful to a fault.

So what's a word for "obedience" that doesn't make me think of resigning my own judgment and discernment?  That doesn't feel like cutting out my part of the process?  Or is that self-centeredness, to think I could riddle out the answers better than others who study the problem?  But then -- whose judgment should I trust?  Who should I believe when they say what God's will is?  Who else do I have besides myself?  Ultimately, it's a decision to trust any person you defer to.  You have to do the research -- you can't just say on judgment day that you were following orders and can't be held accountable for how it ended.

So what is that word then?  The best I've got tonight is "willingness".  Once I have done this long process of figuring my morality out for myself, when I have a moral compass that I can at least own and say is mine, am I willing to accept what I have decided is right?  Am I willing to do it?  Whatever it costs?

That seems more worthwhile than blind obedience.  I must own the action I take in the world.  I can't give myself the excuse of being told and accepting passively what is right or wrong.  I am not obedient.  But I can be willing.

Ash Wednesday

Ash Wednesday
March 5, 2014

Welcome back to the blog.  Today at Mass, I picked up a Daily Reflections for the season of Lent book, because I think my most successful and focused time on this blog was working off daily reflections.  Even if much of the time it was reacting against them.  I like the look of this one, at least based on today's reading.

It's actually kind of funny that the prayer ends "Helps us to...become, like Paul, your ambassadors", because that's what Ash Wednesday and the day-long wearing of ashes on your face are meant to be, but today was the very first time in my life that I actually felt like I was doing it.  Of course, it's hard to measure a simple reminder that I am a person of faith on an ordinary Ash Wednesday, but it's nice when we can do it simply and overtly.

I was appearing for assigned jury duty that ended up not happening (apparently the defendant took a last minute plea deal), and as I was waiting to be called into the courtroom, I sat next to a woman who asked me why several people had ashes on their faces.  It told her we are Catholic and celebrating Ash Wednesday, a day of repentance.

Perhaps I should have stopped there, but I continued (a touch too brightly, really) that it used to be much more hardcore -- designating sinners in the community, forcing them to wear sackcloth and be covered in ashes then formally expelled from the Church for the season of Lent.  Now we acknowledge that we are all sinners so we all need to repent.  I've always felt strongly about that story, but I've never been quite sure what I feel.

The reflection talks about the difference between an individual sin and a sense of sinfulness, which is a good point to consider personally -- especially with all of this "I'm a good person!" stuff going on in our culture as a defense against, say, an individual act of racism.  That's probably the clearest flashpoint for where it happens -- some celebrity or politician does something racist, gets caught, then does and aria or has a minority friend do an aria on how they are a great person who is not a racist in their heart, so everyone should back off because they are clearly overreacting and persecuting people.  Not wanting to feel sinful -- at the expense of acknowledging an individual sin and being willing to repent.

Ash Wednesday used to be about individual sins.  Now it's about the feeling of sinfulness.  It's about feeling marked and dirty in public.  It's about feeling the fact that you are a sinner -- that you are small, that you come from dust and someday you will be nothing but dust again.

I think that Evil has gotten really clever.  Because the rest of the things that have intruded into my thoughts today have pointed out that the deck is stacked in our world and heavily weighted toward being terrible.  On The Colbert Report, a very smart man discussed how tiny little advantages -- that don't feel particularly unethical in the moment -- that lots of money and big computers can get you is what makes it impossible for anyone else to win over the Big Corporations.  Even the government, and it's killing the middle class.

I'd need to do research to decide if he's right, but I think that's what Ash Wednesday, at its best, would remind us of.  Individual acts of even small pettiness or selfishness add up to a sinfulness that we can ignore very easily.  Too many "end of my rope" dismissals of the students' complaints adds up to me not listening to students' needs and being a bad teacher.  Each individual time I tell them no not out of wisdom but out of weariness is not a big deal, but it adds up to not being an approachable mentor.

Little acts of selfishness add up to a feeling of sinfulness that we don't want to carry because we are good people.  We don't do big, damaging violent sins.  We follow the major rules.  We just take out our aggression on mostly innocent people or take an opportunity to screw someone over if we see it and it doesn't seem like a huge deal.  And we add to the sinfulness of our world.

Today we acknowledge it.  Today we wear ashes that acknowledge that we are sinful.

And it's hard, and we look away, and a lot of people wear the ashes with pride, to show their faith and piety, true.  It's bigger than Christmas in the Catholic Church.  When I talked to the woman at the courthouse, I couldn't say that it reminds us that we are all sinful, I said it reminds us that we are all imperfect.

It was a small act, not even enough for a proper sin by most definitions, but it increased the amount of self-preservation at the expense of clarity and truth in the world.  It wasn't a sin, perhaps, but it was sinful.

We don't like sinfulness.  You can't repent for it unless you are willing to fundamentally change your life -- not just swear off this one thing you did once and don't want to do again.  It's hard.  It's like ashes in your heart.

Wear them on your forehead with pride, we are asked one day a year.  Wear the ashes, acknowledge the sinfulness and not just the individual sins.  Acknowledge you need help.  Acknowledge you are part of the sinfulness and unfairness of the world as it is currently built.  Acknowledge that you contribute to racism and sexism and bigotry in dozens of small, nigh-undetectable ways and that you should stop.  That you should stop standing by when tragedies happen around the globe as well as in your backyard.  It's not a sin not to send money to Syria or the Philippines to help those who are dying there.  But the fact that there's not enough aid money to help 2.4 displaced refugees is sinful.  It's a sin on our world.

Ash Wednesday is about acknowledging not our individual guilt but the guilt that we share.