Category Archives: Liturgy

For all the saints

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Fra Angelico saints

Dorothy Day, the feisty co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement, has been called the most interesting and significant figure in the history of American Catholicism. Deeply nourished by a discipline of liturgy and prayer, she devoted her life not only to serving the poor on a daily basis, but also to challenging the very forces that create poverty in the first place. She was a pacifist and activist who sometimes practiced civil disobedience to resist militarism. racism and systemic greed. For her faithful witness to the way of Jesus, she was investigated, jailed, and even shot at. Basically, she understood that the Christian life not only produces thoughts, feelings, and beliefs; it also produces actions that make a difference. It produces people who make a difference.

But “don’t call me a saint,” she warned. “When they call you a saint, it means basically that you’re not to be taken seriously.”

The same sort of neglect has been applied to the Beatitudes, and all the other teachings of Jesus: they are dismissed as unattainable ideals rather than guides to the way we might actually live our lives.

And what do you say? Is it enough for the friends of Jesus, the friends of God, to sit on the sidelines and cheer on the great athletes of sanctity whom we ourselves could never hope to imitate? Or is it about time for the rest of us to get in the game?

When we gather for worship, we may be consoled, we may be inspired, we may be refreshed. Sometimes some of those things happen, sometimes all of them happen, sometimes none of them happen.

But what always happens is, God speaks to us in Word and Sacrament, and then sends us out into the world with an assignment: to do the work we have been given to do.

So what exactly is our assignment, on this Feast of All Saints, 2014? It’s right there in the gospel. First of all, Jesus says, you need to turn the world’s values upside down. You need to look at everything in a new way.

The poor will be blessed with the gift of the kingdom,
while the rich will have to learn the hard way that life can’t be owned.

Everyone who weeps will find out what grace and comfort mean,
while those who are smug and self-satisfied
will be unable to grasp their deepest need.

And if you are marginalized and scorned because you follow me, says Jesus,
you are in such good company,
for that is exactly how the saints were treated.

Jesus never gives easy assignments. Discipleship isn’t kindergarten. It’s graduate school. And if you want to get your PhD, here’s the deal:

Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you,
bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you.
If anyone needs something, give it to them;
and if anyone should relieve you of your attachments,
don’t make a fuss.
Just let it all go.

When Jesus says such things, is he really talking to us? The saints have always thought so, and they have responded accordingly.

So many of their biographies begin with them giving all their money to the poor, and then the rest of the story tells how they keep giving themselves away to God. Saints are the ones whose discipleship knows no limits. They can seem extravagant, immoderate, audacious, even a little weird.

Risking everything. Pouring out everything. Holding nothing back.
Trusting completely the One they follow, even when the way is rough and steep.
No longer looking out for number one,
but giving themselves away in works of love and mercy.

And you mean to be one too, don’t you?

You never know when you’re going to get the call. It could come in a sudden flash of revelation, or it could come on the freeway when someone cuts you off and you must decide whether to respond with anger or with love.

But when the call does come, you know what to say.
People in the Bible said it all the time.
The saints said it all the time.
Here I am.

Here I am. At your disposal. Your will be done.

Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote about how the call came to him: “Almost out of nowhere I heard a voice. ‘Martin Luther, stand up for righteousness. Stand up for justice. Stand up for truth. And lo, I will be with you, even until the end of the world.’” After that, King said, “I was ready to face anything.”

And some of you will remember Dag Hammarskjöld, elected Secretary-General of the United Nations in 1953, who was a tireless worker for world peace. In 1961 he died in a plane crash on his way to deal with a crisis in Africa, and it was only after his death that the world learned that he was not just a famous and effective public figure, but a Christian mystic as well, with a profound and faithful inner life.

Hammarskjöld wrote this about his own call:

I don’t know Who – or what – put the question. I do not know when it was put. I don’t even remember answering. But at some moment I did answer Yes to Someone – or Something – and from that hour I was certain that existence is meaningful and that, therefore, life, in self-surrender, had a goal.

Most of us don’t get such a definitive summons. Sometimes it comes as gradually as the dawn, making its way slowly into our awareness. But wherever we are in that process of awakening, we are being called every day, every hour, to sanctify the moment with a word or an action that makes God visible to others, and plants another seed of resurrection in the soil of ordinary time.

It doesn’t always have to be extraordinary or monumental. Henri Nouwen, in a short list of questions, shows just how simple the work of a saint can be:

Did I offer peace today?
Did I bring a smile to someone’s face?
Did I say words of healing?
Did I let go of my anger and resentments?
Did I forgive?
Did I love?

But you may be thinking: What’s it going to cost me to follow Jesus?
Well, that’s the tricky part. It will cost no less than everything.
But it will also bring perfect joy.

Whatever saints need to give up, whatever their ordeals, whatever their sufferings, saints are not, by and large, a gloomy lot. Even under the most extreme duress, they manage to sound a note of joy.

Sheila Cassidy, a British physician, forged a striking image for this saintly joy in her own experience in a Chilean prison in the 1970’s. She had been imprisoned for treating a wounded revolutionary, and for a while she was tortured. When the torture finally stopped, and she was able to collect herself, her first impulse was to scream out to God for deliverance, begging to be released.

But then another response rose up in her. In her words, it was “to hold out my empty hands to God, not in supplication, but in offering. I would say, not ‘Please let me out’ but ‘Here I am, Lord, take me. I trust you. Do with me what you will….’ In my powerlessness and captivity there remained to me one freedom: I could abandon myself into the hands of God.”

And the image that emerged for her from that moment was of a bird in a cage, which could either “exhaust itself battering its wings against the bars, or else learn to live within the confines of its prison, and find, to its surprise, that it has the strength to sing.”

And how does it go – the song of the caged bird?
I believe it sounds something like this:

I see God in … the marks of … love in every visible thing and it sometimes happens that I am seized by a supreme joy which is above all other joys.

These are the words of a Dutch priest. He wrote them in the concentration camp at Dachau, before he was killed for preaching in defense of the Jews. Such profound joy under duress is not unique among the friends of Jesus. Saints and martyrs have sung this song in every age. Even in the hour of trial, even at the brink of the grave, they have sung this song, because they knew the secret.

They knew that beneath everything, within everything, beyond everything,
there is a Love which is stronger than suffering,
stronger than evil, stronger than death.
It has brought all things into being
It sustains us on our journey
It will guide us safely home.

This Love calls us in every moment – indeed, it is calling right here, right now – to follow, to serve, to embody, to manifest, to surrender. All the saints before us said yes to this call, over and over again. And they are cheering us on to do the same.

Will you say yes to Jesus, yes to God?
Will you stand with the saints today?
Will you join their song?
Will you share their work?
Will you bear their sacrifice?
Will you embrace their perfect joy?

All creatures great and small

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Goldfinch

In the 13th century, what you did with animals was either avoid them, cook them, or work them to death. You certainly didn’t preach to them, pray with them, or receive spiritual gifts from them. Unless you were Francis of Assisi. He called animals his brothers and sisters. He saw them as our teachers. Such countercultural regard for the non-human was seen by his biographers as a restoration of a fallen creation, a renewal of the lost paradise where all creatures, great and small, might live in peace. As Bonaventure wrote,

So it was, that by God’s divine power the brute beasts felt drawn towards him and inanimate creation obeyed his will. It seemed as if he had returned to the state of primeval innocence, he was so good, so holy.

But Francis wasn’t just a dreamer. He was an environmental activist. He lobbied the officials, the governors, and even the Emperor for laws against the abuse of animals. He urged farmers to treat cattle humanely, and convinced towns to scatter seeds on the roads in winter so the birds wouldn’t starve (this is still done in Assisi today). He called for hostels for homeless strays, and raged against the caging of larks.

His love and respect for creation continues to nurture and challenge our own evolving sensibilities about the interdependence of all beings. He wasn’t quite calling for a democracy of creation – one beast, one vote. He remained distinctly medieval in his chivalrous notions of honor, deference and courtesy among the various levels of creation.

Nevertheless, Francis expanded the perimeter of love’s circle far beyond the human tribe, and his example pushes us to do the same.

On the Feast of St. Francis (Oct. 4) in 2012, a group of Episcopal clergy and laity blessed the animals at Seattle’s Woodland Park Zoo. In writing the blessings, I tried to honor and bless the qualities of each species, and name the ways in which those qualities in turn might inform and bless their human kin.

I documented the blessings on video, which you may view here.

The most dangerous place in the world

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Small mtn tent still

I have come to understand that this small ring is the most dangerous place in the world, but also a place where everything is possible, where eyes are opened.

In Jacques Rivette’s magical film, Around a Small Mountain (2009), a footloose Italian named Vittorio, wandering Europe’s back roads in a sports car, chances upon a small French circus on tour in the backwater of Languedoc. Although the story is set in our own time, it is really a medieval romance. Vittorio is the knight errant questing for that nameless object of desire perpetually beyond his grasp. And the enchanted world of the cirque, curiously untouched by modernity, is the place where the knight will be tested.

When Vittorio encounters the enigmatic Kate, a woman who is “a prisoner to what happened” in the circus ring years ago, he lingers in her domain long enough to attempt a rescue. “All the dragons in our lives may be hurt princesses,” he says, echoing Rilke’s famous line: Perhaps everything terrifying is deep down a helpless thing that needs our help.

As Vittorio attempts to break the spell cast over Kate by the lingering presence of a dead father and the haunting absence of a dead lover, he has to face his own dragon, which is never specifically identified. The secret of his being remains a mystery, unknown to himself and to the actor who plays him, unknown to the audience and the director as well. The sentimentality of a conventionally romantic conclusion – man and woman settling down happily ever after – would betray this mystery, and Rivette rejects such an option. The ultimate fate of Kate and Vittorio is not revealed to themselves or us. “Will I start living again?” she wonders. “I don’t know if I am alive,” he says. Might the future perhaps return them to each other? “Who knows?” is the last line of the film.

We exit this cinematic world still mesmerized by its embrace of uncertainty, its refusal of resolution. Like the knight errant, we remain prisoners of unsatisfied longing. We wouldn’t have it any other way. As C. S. Lewis noted, an unsatisfied desire is “more desirable than any other satisfaction.”

Nevertheless, something transformational has happened to Kate and Vittorio and, vicariously, to us, in that “most dangerous place,” the circus ring. They have each stepped into the exposed and empty space where they must perform the truth of themselves, put themselves at risk, wrestle their demons, without really knowing in advance how they’ll ever get through it. But they have already taken their first steps into a new life. In the words of the German Romantic Friedrich Hölderlin, quoted in another Rivette film, “Where danger is, there grows the saving power also.”

I recently saw Around a Small Mountain for the first time, and I was particularly struck by the hermetic quality of the circus. It seems sealed within its own world, having minimal interaction with contemporary life. The landscape it travels remains little changed from the Middle Ages, as if forgotten by modernity. Though the circus is touring the towns around the perimeter of a small mountain, there is little sense of movement from place to place. Wherever the troupe pauses in their circuit, the mountain’s solitary peak still looms in the background, as if the land itself casts a spell they cannot escape.

In the course of the film, we see a number of performances, but they seem to have no public. The first time we enter the tent, there are only a few people in the audience as the camera sweeps over mostly empty seats. After that, the camera doesn’t even bother to look away from the ring to the surrounding bleachers, so we are never sure whether we are viewing a rehearsal or an actual show.

The acts are performed in an almost eerie silence, without applause or any other sounds to indicate the presence of an audience. This melancholy absence of witnesses seems of no concern to the acrobats, jugglers and clowns who carry out their rituals with as much devotion and attention as a priest saying mass in an empty church. Whether what they do is of any relevance to the outside world does not seem an issue for them. What matters is the faithful performance of the circus rites.

As I watched the ritualized actions in the circus ring, skills and gestures passed down through many centuries, imbued with the strangeness of a premodern sensibility, I could not help thinking about the Christian liturgy. We too perform rites forged in a distant past, shaped by a social imaginary largely unintelligible to secular modernity. And like the circus in the film, our “audience” has largely deserted us.

In his audio commentary on the DVD, Chris Fujimara describes the circus as “an end state, a final repository, a gathering and summation. Everything in life is being distilled and evoked from this ring in a way that has to do with aging, with memory, with death, with the imminent end of things, with the suggestion that the circus, this mode of entertainment and spectacle, already belongs to the past.”

There are those who see Christianity’s own pastness as prelude to extinction, and believe everything alien to the present social imaginary should be jettisoned as quickly as possible. I myself have spent over forty years adding radically contemporary elements to the worship mix. But that has never, I hope, been at the expense of the strangeness of what we do and the mystery of what we worship.

In some future posts I will have more to say about the implications of this strangeness for the concrete practices of worship as well as the need to connect with an absent public. But for now, like the ringmaster, may I simply direct your attention to the center ring, the most dangerous place in the world, the empty space where everything is possible, where eyes are opened. To paraphrase Jacques Rivette, “there is no other subject.”

God’s not fair!

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Sign at Occupy LA city hall encampment, October 2011

Sign at Occupy LA city hall encampment, October 2011

If any have toiled from the first hour,
let them receive their due reward;
If any have come after the third hour,
let them with gratitude join in the Feast!
And those that arrived after the sixth hour,
let them not doubt; for they too shall sustain no loss.
And if any delayed until the ninth hour,
let them not hesitate; but let them come too.
And those who arrived only at the eleventh hour,
let them not be afraid by reason of their delay.
For the Lord is gracious
and receives the last even as the first.
Christ gives rest to those that come at the eleventh hour,
as well as to those that toiled from the first.

This famous passage from the ancient Paschal homily of St. John Chrysostom is a marvelous riff on Jesus’ parable of the Workers in the Vineyard (Mt. 20:1-16). It’s certainly good news to the latecomers, but rather disconcerting to those of us who have a strict idea of who’s in and who’s out. You never know what kind of people you’re going to run into at God’s place. You may have to break bread with some who haven’t earned their place at the table the way you have, who haven’t paid their dues the way you have. It’s not fair. The kingdom of God is not fair.

That’s the trouble with mercy and forgiveness and grace. They are so undiscriminating. How are we supposed to know where we stand, how can we measure up, how can we hold others accountable, if the standards are so loose and slippery?

Let’s face it. Jesus was a terrible bookkeeper. He didn’t maintain accurate accounts of how everyone was doing. He was too busy throwing a party for God’s friends. Y’all come. Everyone’s welcome!

The first disciples who listened to this story undoubtedly needed to hear its message. They were anxious about where they stood with Jesus and with God. Lord, who’s going to sit at your right hand and who’s going to sit on your left? What are we going to get for following you? Whom do you love the most? This anxiety about status and privilege continues in the Book of Acts, when some of the original Jewish believers resent the influx of Gentile converts. And we have our own versions of this calculating mentality today. Who’s in, who’s out? Who’s better, who’s worse? Who belongs, who doesn’t? Who’s saved, who’s not?

But with this parable, Jesus tells us:

  • Stop worrying about wages. The kingdom isn’t something you earn. It’s a gift. Be glad you are one of the recipients.
  • Don’t worry about how much you’ll get. You’ll get what you need. You really will.
  • Stop comparing yourselves to others. God loves everyone equally.
  • Don’t be envious or resentful of someone else’s good fortune, even when you think it’s undeserved. Be glad that God is so generous, even if it’s not always about you.

Once the whole idea of a bookkeeping religion has been exploded by this parable, we begin to realize that it’s not a story about wages at all. It’s a story about the vineyard. Everyone gets invited to the vineyard, and ending up there together is the whole point. The latest have not come too late, and the earliest have not come too early. In the end, everyone is there, no one is missing.

Now if you don’t want to be part of this vineyard collective, just take what you’ve earned and go. That’s what the master tells the complainers, the bookkeepers, and to me it’s the most chilling line in the story. You don’t want any part of the kingdom’s undiscriminating generosity? OK, fine. Go off and be by yourself, or with your little circle of the like-minded. But you may find it rather lonely. And you’ll miss one hell of a party.

A feather on the breath of God

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Hildegard at desk

When I was 42 years and 7 months old, a burning light of tremendous brightness coming from heaven poured into my entire mind. Like a flame that does not burn but enkindles, it inflamed my entire heart … just like the sun that warms an object with its rays.

So wrote Hildegard of Bingen, a twelfth-century abbess, artist and activist whose feast is celebrated today. In a society where women were more seen than heard, it took her a long time to find an outlet for her voice. She had experienced visions ever since her childhood, but she kept them mostly to herself until she was in her forties. Her reticence wasn’t just due to social pressure. She also shared the self-doubting anxiety of every artist. Did her visions matter? Would the world understand or care? But as every artist knows, if you have a gift and don’t make it visible, it will sicken and die within you, and your own body will suffer the effects.

And Hildegard in fact became a sickly woman: “Not in stubbornness but in humility, I refused to write for so long that I felt pressed down under the whip of God into a bed of sickness.” But at last she overcame her inhibitions. Her call was too strong to resist. She began to write, and compose, and produce paintings of her visions. Her body was restored to health, and from then on, she tried to live the life only she could live.

In one of her visions, God told her: O how beautiful your eyes are when you tell the divine story!

Tell the divine story: That was the work she had been given to do. In addition to the normal duties of a medieval abbess in the Rhineland, Hildegard became a storyteller, a musician, an artist, a writer; and through all these media she obeyed the command given to every artist, to “make visible what, without you, might never be seen.” She was also an activist, reminding the powerful to show compassion to the poor, and railing against clergy who failed to blow “the trumpets of divine justice.”

Hildegard was always mindful of the source of her creativity:

The marvels of God are not brought forth from one’s self.
Rather, it is more like a chord, a sound that is played.
The tone does not come out of the chord itself,
but rather, through the touch of the musician.
I am, of course, the lyre and harp of God’s kindness.

She put this even more succinctly when she called herself “a feather on the breath of God”

The bright-colored enigmas of her illustrated visions, painted by others under her supervision, are unlike anything else in western medieval art. Figures embedded within circles or mandalas express her experience of God as being “like a wheel, a circle, a whole, that can neither be understood, nor divided, nor begun nor ended … just as a circle embraces all that is within it, so does the Godhead embrace all …. You are encircled by the arms of the mystery of God.”

Hildegard’s music was as original as her images. Her compositions resemble the Gregorian chant of her time in their liturgical form and musical modes. They also conform to plainchant’s suppression of extroverted individuality for the sake of devotional calm. At the same time, they go beyond traditional chant in several ways: her melodies have an exotically wide range, often spanning two octaves, with sudden leaps from low notes to high notes; her texts are rhapsodic outpourings of strikingly original imagery; and her songs possess a freedom and exuberance that reflect an artist on the loose.

Her music wasn’t primarily a form of personal expression. It was a manifestation of deepest reality. “O Trinity, you are music, you are life,” she prayed. For Hildegard, “all of creation is a song of praise to God.”

She didn’t make up her songs; she listened in to the music of heaven:

Then I saw the lucent sky, in which I heard different kinds of music, marvelously embodying all the meanings I had heard before. I heard the praises of the joyous citizens of heaven, steadfastly persevering in the ways of Truth; and laments calling people back to those praises and joys; and the exhortations of the virtues.

This was more than metaphor, as her writings make clear. Her compositions came to her whole, given by God, much like the auditory mysticism of St. John the Divine, who wrote in the Book of Revelation: “And I heard a voice from heaven like the sound of many waters and like the sound of loud thunder; the voice I heard was like the sound of harpists playing on their harps, and they sang a new song before the throne.”

Hildegard believed that the music of heaven is in us and all around us. We have been created to harmonize with it. “The soul is symphonic,” she said.

She conceived a charming image of Adam before the Fall: he sang with a voice of pure honey, and the devil knew that as long as Adam managed to remember the sweetness of the heavenly songs, he could never be tempted. So with Adam, as with all of us who have come after, the devil set out “to trouble or destroy the affirmation and beauty and sweetness of divine praise and of the hymns of the spirit.”

In Hildegard’s opera, Ordo Virtutum, an allegory of the virtues, all the characters sing – except the devil, who can only heckle and shout. The devil’s work is dissonance, the shattering of harmony.

Hildegard once had a dispute with the bishops of her diocese, who tried to force her submission on a matter of principle by forbidding her nuns to take communion or to sing the liturgy. It was a terrible ordeal for her community to live without music. Hildegard remarked at the time that those who choose to silence music in their lifetime will go to a place where they will be “without the company of the angelic songs of praises in heaven.” It was her discreet way of telling the prelates to go to hell.

Every artist has to deal with philistines, but we can be thankful that Hildegard’s enormous gifts were for the most part supported by her contemporaries. She fell into obscurity for centuries after her death, but she returns anew to our own time with a voice we long to hear, a voice resonant with compassion, a voice aflame with justice, a voice attuned to the divine harmony for which all of us are made.

Sometimes Hildegard seems to live in a different universe than we do, a universe alive with multi-sensory evidence that God is “burning everywhere,” that everything in the world is dense with meaning and liveliness.

All the senses, in her universe, deliver this message to the receptive soul. Unlike the purely material universe proposed by modernity, a happenstance of mute objects and dead space, Hildegard’s universe was sacramental, alive with significant presence.

In one of her visions, a human figure stands in the center of a cosmic wheel. This Christlike image of Divinity declares to her and to all the world:

I, the highest and fiery power,
have kindled every spark of life …
I, the fiery life of divine essence,
am aflame beyond the beauty of the meadows.
I gleam in the waters. I burn in the sun, moon and stars.
With every breeze, as with invisible life that contains everything,
I awaken everything to life.

Is this not the high calling of every saint – and every artist?
To awaken everything to life.
To set our imagination aflame.
To make visible the unsurpassable beauty of God.

As Simon Weil put it so well in our own era,

A sense of beauty, although mutilated, distorted, and soiled, remains rooted in the human heart as a powerful incentive… If it were made true and pure, it would sweep all secular life in a body to the feet of God.

Seventy times seven

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Jacopo da Pontormo, Deposition (1525-26), Capponi Chapel, Santa Felicita, Florence

Jacopo da Pontormo, Deposition (1525-26), Capponi Chapel, Santa Felicita, Florence

A homily on Matthew 18:21-35 for the 14th Sunday after Pentecost (and 9/11)

So Peter comes up to Jesus and says, “Lord, forgiveness is really hard work. When do I get to quit?”

And Jesus says, “Peter, sometimes you’re as dumb as a rock. If you want to stay with me, you can never stop forgiving.”

“But Lord, you don’t expect me to forgive everyone, do you?”

“Yes, Peter. Everyone.”

          The Gospel of the Lord.

I once led a workshop exercise based on the Flood story. We all wrote on cards the types of people we thought the world would be better off without – drug dealers, terrorists, polluters, tax collectors and sinners, etc. – and we put our cards in a pile in the center of our circle. Each person had to pick a card, becoming the character they drew. Then they each had to make a case for themselves, to persuade us to let them come aboard the ark rather than be left to die in the flood. Most of us had at least one or two people we didn’t want to sail with, but some of the women – though none of the men – voted to forgive everyone.

How would you vote? Saved, or drowned?

The driver who cut you off on the freeway?
The neighbor who won’t quiet her barking dogs?
The priest who failed to visit you when you were sick?

How would you vote?

The colleague who stabbed you in the back?
The friend who let you down?
The spouse who betrayed you?

How would you vote?

The football player who knocked out his fiancé in an elevator?
The fanatics who flew the planes into the towers?
The lawyers and politicians who made torture a national policy?
The men who beheaded American journalists on YouTube?

Let’s be clear. Forgiveness doesn’t mean condoning or tolerating wicked acts. It doesn’t mean a wife should stay with an abusive husband, or that we can’t feel shock and outrage when we witness hateful instances of oppression or racism or brutality.

What forgiveness does mean is that
we don’t let those things have the last word.

We all know about this on a personal level. You may never forget a wounding encounter, but you know you can’t let it fester inside forever, you can’t give it power over you forever. At some point, you have to let it go.

Tell the truth about it, to the offender if possible, and to yourself. Don’t minimize the damage. But don’t hold on to the hurt. Don’t make your life about the hurt.

Forgiveness means leaving resentment behind. It means letting go of the reactive desire for punishment. There was a POW who said he could never forgive his captors. So a friend told him, “Then they’ve still got you in their prison.”

Rabbi Harold Kushner told a woman who was betrayed and abandoned by her husband: “I’m not asking you to forgive him because what he did was acceptable… I’m asking you to forgive because he doesn’t deserve the power to live in your head and turn you into a bitter angry woman…. you keep holding on to him. You’re not hurting him by holding on to that resentment. You’re hurting yourself.”

That’s all true as far as it goes. We can be bigger than our hurts. We can live in the present, not the past. But when Jesus told us to forgive, he wasn’t just talking about our personal well-being.

He was talking about a radical revolution in human relations.
He was telling us to exit the endless cycle of violence and retribution.
He was telling us to choose life, not death.

Those terrorists who committed atrocities on YouTube,
they want our rage, they welcome our hate,
because it means we are consenting to play their game of death,
adding our own tributaries of anger to their river of violence.

So we are presented with a clear choice:
Either forgive them,
or become them.

Jesus is asking something very hard of us.
Yes, maybe we can forgive the ordinary hurts of daily life.
But how can we forgive those monsters on YouTube?
That goes against human nature. That seems impossible.

Maybe it was impossible once. But Jesus, who died forgiving his own killers, has redefined what is possible. Jesus has opened the door to redemption for even the worst of sinners.

They may not always go through that door – some may choose to remain in the godless hell of their own self-will, but we are not allowed to close the door on them. We are not allowed to deny anyone the possibility of redemption, the possibility of reconciliation and healing.

God wants to do something new with this world, and as long as we perpetuate the cycle of violence and vengeance, that new thing cannot happen.

If we say that there are some people who cannot be saved, we are limiting the power and grace of God, and we are refusing our own vocation to be God’s agents of grace and forgiveness not only for the people we know, but for the stranger and the enemy as well.

We can do this, Jesus assures us. We can forgive – not because we are saints with extraordinary powers, but because we are sinners who have ourselves been forgiven.

Just ask St. Paul, who reminds us this morning not to judge one another, who asks us to remember that since we all belong to God, we also belong to one another. These are the words of the man who held the coats for Stephen’s murderers while they stoned the first Christian martyr.

If that stoning had been on YouTube, we might still be holding that horrifying image in our minds, still hating Paul as a monster instead of reading his words as Scripture. Paul knew what it meant to be forgiven, and that’s why he could be so eloquent about grace.

“We all stand before the judgment seat of God,” he says.
Lord have mercy. Christ have mercy.

When Peter asked his question about forgiveness, Jesus told him a story.

A slave who owes his master a gazillion dollars is forgiven this unpayable debt, but then he goes right out and finds a fellow slave who happens to owe him fifty cents. He grabs him by the throat.
“Pay me now!” he says.
“Have mercy!” the man cries. “I cannot pay you.”
“That’s not my problem,” he says, and throws the man into a dungeon until he can pay what he owes.

It’s one of Jesus’ craziest stories, and it’s meant to be. The absurdity of the parable puts a spotlight on our own absurdity when we who have been forgiven so much refuse to pass that forgiveness on to others.

If we say we have no sin, we are only deceiving ourselves. It’s not just a matter of how we act as individuals. We must also acknowledge our inescapable participation, conscious or unconscious, voluntary or involuntary, in all the systemic processes that negate the flourishing of life on earth. Just by functioning within the habitual realities and practices of a fallen and imperfect world, we become complicit in the things that fall short of God’s intention, the things that disappoint God’s hope for us.

And still, God loves us.
And still, God forgives us.
And still, God keeps heaven’s door open
and leaves the light on for us.

Perhaps you saw the extraordinary film, Of Gods and Men, which came out a few years ago. It tells the true story of eight French Catholic monks who lived in the mountains of Algeria during a time of civil war and terrorist violence in the 1990’s. Their monastery was at the edge of a poor Muslim village, where they lived in harmony with their neighbors, providing the village’s only accessible health care.

As the surrounding political violence escalated, the monks were warned by the government to leave the country. As Catholics in a Muslim country, they would be suspected of trying to make converts. Their very presence was an offense to the religious extremists. But the monks felt called to remain among the people they served, despite the high probability of martyrdom. Despite their own fears.

“If something happens to us, although I do not wish it to,” wrote Brother Michael, one of the monks, “we want to live it here in solidarity with all the Algerians, men and women, who have already paid with their lives, and in union with all unknown innocent victims.”

As for the armed rebels and the armed soldiers who were fighting all around them, the monks called them “our brothers of the mountains and our brothers of the plains.”

Their abbot, Dom Christian, wrote a letter to his family in Advent, 1993, two and a half years before he and his brother monks were beheaded by terrorists. Anticipating his own martyrdom, he insists that he is not exceptional, since so many others in that land were also at risk.

“My life,” he wrote, “is not worth more than any other — not less, not more. Nor am I an innocent child. I have lived long enough to know that I, too, am an accomplice of the evil that seems to prevail in the world around, even that which might lash out blindly at me. If the moment comes, I would hope to have the presence of mind, and the time, to ask for God’s pardon … and, at the same time, to pardon in all sincerity him who would attack me…”

What an extraordinary thing to say: Here is a good and humble and holy man confessing his own complicity in the evils of the world. And what does he hope for? He hopes for the presence of mind, in the very moment of being murdered, to ask forgiveness. Forgiveness not only for himself, but for his killer as well. As he had once said of his monastic community, “we should openly be on the side of love, forgiveness and communion, against hate, vengeance and violence.”

The last part of Christian’s letter is addressed not to his family, his loved ones, but to the unknown violent stranger who will one day kill him, the stranger whom he calls “my friend of the last moment.”

He calls his killer friend, refusing the way of violence and vengeance and hate, and by so doing he plants the kingdom of forgiveness in the very place where his own blood would be spilled by his assassin’s sword.

He commends that assassin not to hell, not to eternal punishment, but to God. A-dieu, he tells him. A-dieu: “to God.” And then he imagines a future that may seem impossible to us, but is the only future which God desires.

Listen to what he says. This is how Christian ends his letter; this is what he wants to tell the stranger who will one day cut off his head:

“And to you, too, my friend of the last moment, who will not know what you are doing. Yes, for you, too, I wish this Merci, this “A-Dieu,” because in God’s face I see yours. May we meet again as happy thieves in Paradise, if it please God, the Father of us both.”

Experiments in worship

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Last month’s 40th anniversary of the first Episcopal ordinations of women to the priesthood evoked a wide sharing of memories and stories about a church breaking from inherited ways to make a significant rewrite of its identity and practice. That break did not happen without resistance and struggle, but the shift was irreversible. A less complete priesthood is now unimaginable.

But there was also another revolution underway in 1974, a campaign for liturgical renewal being carried out on many fronts. Scholars had been making the case for change for decades, leading to such major revisions as Vatican II and the 1979 Book of Common Prayer. At the grassroots level, early experiments in “indigenous” youth culture masses laid the foundations for “alt.worship” and “fresh expressions.”

My first year of ordained ministry was at Canterbury House in Ann Arbor, a campus ministry known for its coffeehouse concerts (Neil Young and Joni Mitchell played there) and its innovative worship. At the end of the Sixties, our congregation of college youth valued meaning over form, allowing us the freedom to re-imagine the way we worshipped on a Sunday by Sunday basis. Sometimes the results were sublime and indelible, while there were also some abysmal flops. But that was okay. Everyone understood that our liturgical mission was to experiment: it was as important to know what didn’t work as what did.

In the Seventies, I became liturgical artist-in-residence at St. John’s, Los Angeles, a gorgeous cathedral-sized church with a progressive multi-cultural congregation. Under prophetic rectors Larry Carter and then Bill Persell, it had become a well-known site of conscientious witness against war, poverty and injustice (Cesar Chavez and the Berrigans thundered from St. John’s pulpit). Although the traditional Sunday morning liturgy was satisfyingly rich, we instituted a monthly Sunday evening series of alternative eucharists (“The Third Sunday”) to explore a wider range of themes and experiential models.

It wasn’t simply a matter of utilizing contemporary texts or plugging in unexpected kinds of music (although bagpipes and synthesizers each provided amazing sounds). We also explored different ways to structure the entire underlying form of the rite. Sometimes we employed worship templates drawn from mythic literary motifs like the Book of Revelation, the Divine Comedy, or the Harrowing of Hell. On Palm Sunday, two “carpenters” (one of whom is now the dean of the National Cathedral) built a cross near the altar throughout the liturgy, occasionally discussing the morality of capital punishment. During the Words of Institution (“This is my body … This is my blood”), their hammers pounded nails into the cross.

My favorite Third Sunday liturgy was a very early example of installation worship: an Advent journey, in groups of six, through a long enclosed corridor circling behind the chancel. The dark, narrow space was filled with projections and recorded poetry (“Inferno,” “Dover Beach,” “Four Quartets”). There was even a descent into a solipsistic hell (a dismal basement room with only live TV images of your own face). But in the end, you emerged into a candlelit chapel of shimmering gold mosaics and exquisite chant, taking your place with those who had made the journey before you, as if you were being welcomed into heaven.

The year 1974 began with the grandest alternative worship experience of my life, at a national gathering of 400 Episcopal college students, professors, and campus ministers during the first week of January. This was a few months after the Episcopal General Convention had once again rejected women’s ordination, and replaced the progressive Presiding Bishop with a southern conservative. It felt like a double slap in the face for progressives. The collegiate Episcopalians, restless and discontented, were having serious doubts about the institution. Some expressed their anger by questioning the value of the all-night liturgy planned for Epiphany. Wasn’t it being designed by three white males (Bill Teska, Mark Harris, and myself)? Down with elitism and sexism!

They had a point. We were just three friends with particular skills who had volunteered to design something memorable. We hadn’t really thought through inclusivity issues. All our attention was on the product, not the process, and we got called on it. There was talk of staging a protest to bring the liturgy to a halt, but artful negotiation transformed the proposed rupture into small group discussions that would be an official part of the liturgy.

The gathering was in Florida, where the temperature would remain comfortable through the hours of darkness. The “Great Liturgy” of Epiphany began at midnight beneath the full moon, with the congregation singing and processing three times around the worship space – a circus tent with its sides rolled up, in the middle of an empty field. When we finally entered the tent, people broke into small groups to share their hopes and fears for the church. Once these conversations were reported to the whole assembly, the liturgy began in earnest.

A simple Compline was followed by a cosmo-political Penitential Rite: a ninety-minute trip through Creation, History and Apocalypse, using 12 projectors, sampled sounds from the news, pop music, poetry, movie dialogue and Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. Then the Seven Seals in the Book of Revelation were opened by means of participatory theater games, climaxing with a ritual “dying” (falling to the ground) by the people, and then a rising up again, led by three Magi (one of them female). “We have come looking for the Holy One,” the Magi declared. And one by one we rose to our feet, crying “He is here!” and “She is here!” and “We are here!”

It was now about 3 am, time for a half hour pause of silent meditation, ending with a grand entrance procession of the eucharistic ministers preceded by six thurifers, filling the tent with incense. A jazz matins enlivened the Service of the Word, then a ninety-minute Offertory presented the gifts of the community before the altar – heartfelt testimonies, dance, a Navajo healing chant, a gospel quintet. By now the full moon, overhead when we began, was setting into the trees beyond the tent.

During the eucharistic prayer, a revolving mirror sphere painted the interior with kinetic light, and pulsing strobes flashed upon the bread and wine during the Words of Institution, making an almost hallucinatory intensification of the elements (definitely more Baroque than Cistercian!). After communion, we all processed out of the tent into the light of the rising sun, singing an Appalachian spiritual:

Bright morning stars are rising,
Day is a-breaking in my soul.”

Seven and a half hours from beginning to end,
moonlight to sunrise,
a Christian dreamtime.

It is the nature of liturgy – and language – to consist of mediating symbols. We aren’t allowed to see God face to face. As Isaiah realized in his Temple vision, such an encounter would obliterate us, swallow up our particularity, which is only made possible through the degree of separation we are given from the All. We don’t get to grasp “total presence” in this life, but only the words, images and sacraments that connect us with that (absent) presence. And yet there are times when the divine leaps across the gap, the bush burns bright before our eyes, and we hear the Voice calling our name. That Epiphany in a circus tent was one of those times.

So when I think of the church of 1974, I not only remember how we began to embrace a more inclusive priesthood, but also how free we were to explore both the means and the meaning of our deepest rituals. May it be so again.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After the play is over

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I just saw King Lear at the National Theater of London – via an HD broadcast at a Seattle cinema. Directed by Sam Mendes, with Simon Russell Beale in the lead, it had some fresh approaches, with mixed success. But for all that worked or didn’t work for this playgoer, the power of the text remained intact, just as the validity of the mass is independent of the presider’s worthiness.

The play’s opening crisis turns on Cordelia’s refusal to join in her sisters’ ‘glib and oily’ flatteries of their father the king. Lear, sensing the imminent waning of his vitality and power, has an insatiable need for reassurance, but the one daughter who truly loves him refuses to play that hypocritical game. The filial bond, she insists, goes without saying. In fact, no words can do it justice. Better to remain silent than say something inadequate or inexact. If only she had compromised a bit, tossed some verbal meat to her famished parent, she might never have come ‘between the dragon and his wrath.’ But she is as proud and stubborn as her sire, and so the dysfunctional Lear family begins to implode, plunging the kingdom – and all sense of stable, coherent reality – into the abyss.

Clare Asquith, in her controversial book Shadowplay, finds Shakespeare’s dramas full of pro-Catholic allusions and references to the political and religious situation of his time. The figure of an unwise ruler offered a salutary warning to James I, whose stern policies of religious conformity endangered English unity; Lear’s need for his daughters’ professions of loyalty mirrored the judicial interrogations of suspect Catholics and Puritans; the virtuous Edgar’s flight into wilderness and disguise suggested the plight of the Jesuit priests preserving the persecuted old faith in secret hiding places. Mendes’ version contains its own timely references, from the waterboarding torture of Gloucester to the implicit diagnosis of Lear’s madness as Lewy dementia.

But if the play were only “contemporary,” whether for a seventeenth-century audience or a twenty-first, it would not have the same power to haunt and trouble us. King Lear, in Martin Esslin’s words, provides “an image of aging and death, the waning of powers, the slipping away of our hold on our environment.” These are universals of the human condition, the dark foundation upon which any spirituality must be constructed. But even when we try to salvage something from the wreckage (Did Lear learn and grow from his suffering? Does it matter that two good men, Edgar and Kent, outlived the tragedy to bear witness?), the apocalyptic storm on the heath, reducing all our certainties to ‘nothing’ (a word repeated many times throughout the play), continues to echo long after the curtain falls.

But in the National Theater broadcast, there was no time for the themes to resonate once the play was done. After Edgar’s mournful speech (“The weight of this sad time we must obey, / Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say…”), the stage went black. But before we could even begin to measure the weight of tragedy, the London audience began to applaud, the lights came up again, and the players, now smiling, returned to the stage to take their bows. Their characters had vanished, replaced by the contemporary personalities of the actors themselves. Such hasty return to ordinary life felt unseemly. Could we not linger in Lear’s universe a moment longer, let the emotion begin to settle and subside before politely pretending we had not just been ripped apart by the howling storm of Shakespeare’s text?

When, years ago, I saw Theatre du Soleil’s legendary production of Richard II, such a transition was in fact provided, for which I have always been grateful. The French company had performed in whiteface, with costumes and ritualized movements drawn from Japan’s kabuki theater. The ceremonial strangeness of the production utterly removed us from any sense of the familiar or natural. If we were not actually transported to a medieval Neverland of ritual and transcendent constraints, it certainly felt like it. And after the play’s stunning, tragic conclusion, the company took care not to wake us too quickly from that dream.

They did it by remaining in character. The whiteface still veiled their personalities, as any kind of mask does. While wearing a mask, you are not yourself, but the role. And their whitened faces remained intense and unsmiling, even as the applause thundered our Amen to the experience they had given us. It was still Richard and Bolingbroke on that stage, not some modern imposters. Even their bows, formal and liturgical rather than personal and spontaneous, prolonged the sense of gravity.

Performing arts, like religious ritual, strive to take us somewhere else, to give us something we might not receive in any other way. But too little attention is given to the transitions between ordinary life and the concentrated/consecrated space of a performance, whether artistic or liturgical. How does the environment we enter help us prepare for what is to come? And when the “play” is over, is there a way to linger, absorb, and reflect before it melts into thin air? I once saw Zubin Mehta, after conducting an emotional performance of Mahler’s “Resurrection Symphony” (even the musicians were wiping their eyes) keep his arms raised for a full 20 seconds after the last notes subsided, finally lowering them ever so slowly, in order to preserve a proper silence just long enough. But most performances – and liturgies – simply end with a jump cut (no slow dissolve!) back into whatever we were calling reality. As though nothing had transpired. As though we had not been changed.

What if (as I witnessed after a screening of Robert Bresson’s heartbreaking Au Hasard Balthasar) an audience just sat in stunned silence, not talking or moving for several minutes? What if (as at every Sunday mass with the radiant monks and nuns of Paris’ St. Gervais) you arrived at church twenty minutes early to find a hundred people already there, engaged in silent prayer? What if (as is common after Holy Week liturgies) the congregation exited the church without a word, still wrapped in the mystery of divine presence?