Shutting Down

Does a body ‘decide’, like a government, when to shut down?  Is our own physical shutting down, slowing down, winding down, a decision or something that merely happens to us, like time?

If bodies, as my faith teaches, resurrect, do governments?

If we’re sitting on an ash heap, what phoenix-like new thing will emerge?

Metaphors only take us so far in our understandings, don’t they?

So mostly today, I am left wondering.  And maybe that’s not such a bad thing.  As poet Rainer Maria Rilke once pointed out to a young would-be poet (I’ve always wondered whether his promise every bloomed into something I may have read*) . . .

I would like to beg you dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

 And because it is a wondering day, I am also wondering how someone with the pen of a Rilke could also reportedly have said that fascism is a source of healing and Mussolini its bringer.  And then I wonder what questions another might have when looking into my life at such a distance.  It is not forgiveness, exactly (for that is not mine to offer or deem necessary), but the question stays a question, at least for now.


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*It seems history does know the young poet, but mostly only via this correspondence.  Wikipedia.  

Seeing Stars

While in seminary back in 2005, I took a wonderful class on church art throughout history.  On a cold February day, we considered cathedrals.  By that time, I had spent my student year in Scotland, at the end of which my mother and I toured the circumference of England, visiting so many cathedrals along the way that by the time we got to Yorkminster, this Calvinist Protestant was ready to scream, No more cathedrals!

No more opulence, no more vaulted ceilings and ornate stonework, no more gothic arches and clever niches, no more high pulpits and graves inside church – it was all just too much for my love-of-plainness soul.

Photo by Francois Thomas at Wikimedia Commons

My visceral reaction had calmed quite a bit in the intervening year, so that by the time the class assignment to create our own scrapbook of church art came around, I was glad to have snapshots of all those vaulted ceilings and of the chance to learn more about what it was all intended to symbolize.

Often Jesus appears in the center of the cathedral ceiling sitting on a throne in these art pieces that make up part of the worship space (and it is pretty cool that even the ceilings were considered part of the worship ‘space’).

The artistic representation is beautiful.

Yet I am troubled –  why is it that Jesus is on the throne?  We are so in love with imperial regalia.

Jesus comes as a servant king, if any kind of king at all.  Why does not our art, especially our grandest, image Jesus on his knees, rather than as a kingly demanding figure suggesting that we must be on ours?  Not that I object to being on my knees, but it seems we’re missing something important.  Rilke well knew how the painting of Jesus in the regalia of the earthly king actually disguises him, changes him into something he was, he is, not.

We must not portray you in king’s robes,

you drifting mist that brought forth the morning.

Once again from the old paintboxes

we take the same gold for scepter and crown

that has disguised you through the ages.

Piously we produce our images of you

till they stand around you like a thousand walls.

And when our hearts would simply open,

our fervent hands hide you.*

To be fair to the long-ago architects of these fabulous structures, they had a very real sense of God as architect and master builder.

But I also learned that for them, the positioning of Jesus on the throne at the apex of the high vaulted ceilings was to prefigure Judgment day.

Like everyone else visiting these places, I always look up and am reminded of my very small place within the cosmos.  But it is not judgment that I am minded of.

For where they saw reckoning, I see the stars.


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*Book of Hours: Love Poems to God, Rainer Maria Rilke.  Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy, Trans.  New York: Riverhead Books, 1996, p. 50

Cliff Notes: Christ the King

God Wants You in the Wow Not the Woe

(Sermon Reprise - First given in Nov. 2008)

Addressing God directly, poet Rainer Maria Rilke writes:

We must not portray you in king’s robes,

you drifting mist that brought forth the morning.

Once again from the old paintboxes

we take the same gold for scepter and crown

that has disguised you through the ages.

Piously we produce our images of you

till they stand around you like a thousand walls.

And when our hearts would simply open,

our fervent hands hide you.

In Jesus’ parable of the sheep and goats, Jesus is giving us a vision of God-as-King.  This story is first and foremost God’s story.  If we look to earthly kings to understand our God-King, we look in vain.
A king is someone who has the power to force others to bend to his will. . . someone who orders rather than asks. . . At least an earthly king does.
Our heavenly God-King seeks, asks, knocks . . . the very thing he told us to do with him, he does first with us . . . persists in knocking at the door of our goat selves, begging for entry.
We humans have been very busy trying to reinvent our God-King into our own image: as Rilke says, we have covered him up with the trappings of earth-bound majesty . . .
We’ve painted him with beauty who became our ugliness that we might be freed from its cost . . .
We’ve crowned him with splendor who came and comes quietly, like a thief . . . in the night . . .to take away that which belongs always and only to us . . . our judgment . . .
We’ve burdened him with gold who burdened himself with the weight of our sins . . .
Christ our King, our God, wants for us the wow of God, not the woe.
The joy, not the sorrow . . .
The awe, not the indifference . . .
The service of love, not the debt of guilt . . .
The wow, not the woe . . .
Meeting Jesus face to face is risky business.  Barbara Brown Taylor in The Preaching Life, says, “. . . to tell if they are really Jesus’ eyes . . . look into them, to risk that moment of recognition that may break your heart, or change your mind, or make you mad, or make you amend your life.  Whatever effect it has on you, that seems to be one thing the sheep know how to do that the goats have never tried:  to look, to see, to seek Christ in the last, the lost, the least. . .”
The ‘least of these’ are giving as well as receiving, teaching us even as we are giving to them. . .the hard brokenness of the goat misses the chance to learn grace from those who have nothing to give but grace . . .
The soft compassion of sheep is mistaken all too often in our world for weakness . . . for a lack of standards, for a lack of clear moral principles . . . but Jesus embraces as strength what the world holds to be weakness . . . and therein lies Jesus’ strength.
We are all, each and every one of us, the least of these . . .
The bad news is that we’re all goats . . . sometimes . . .
The good news is that we’re all sheep . . . sometimes. . .
The Great Good News is that God our shepherd is a sheep . . . all the time.