Right Now . . .

Prayer offered during International Day of Peace Service

"We need to build not only geographical but spiritual bridges between people. . .”                                                        – UNESCO

TIME OF SILENCE

"The International Day of Peace is also a Day of Ceasefire – personal or political. Take this opportunity to make peace in your own relationships as well as impact the larger conflicts of our time. Imagine what a whole Day of Ceasefire would mean to humankind."  --International Day of Peace web site

WE CONFESS . . . RIGHT NOW . . . 

Right now, unless there is a last-minute reprieve[fn], Troy Davis is drawing his last breaths on earth. . .  Right now, the Palestinian people are urging the world to agree that they are a people and that they have a country and are being told ‘not here, not now’. . . Right now . . . people we know have bodies filled with cancer and the best that can be done for them is to attack and wage war against the very bodies in which they live . . . Right now . . . families are broken by misunderstanding, violence, bullying, and refusals to reconcile . . . Right now . . . churches hide their own brokenness and protect those who do the worst kind of harm . . . Right now . . . Oh God, right now, we are so broken . . . so far from Your peace . . . forgive us God, we pray . . . right now.

WE COMMIT . . . RIGHT NOW . . . 

Let us create a wall of peace, not of separation and exclusion, not of wailing and mourning, but a wall of peace . . . a visible sign of the commitment we make, right here and right now . . . the commitment to no longer be silent in the face of injustice, unkindness, and violence . . . the commitment to be God’s own peaceable kingdom . . . right here . . . right now.

_________
Fn.  There was a last-minute reprieve, but it only lasted hours, and Troy Davis drew his last breaths at 11:08 p.m. last night, Wednesday, September 21, 2011.  Execution of Troy Davis

I Friended God Today

I friended (don’t you love that ‘friend’ is now a verb, as in “I friended you.  Why didn’t you friend me back?”) someone today and he responded so quickly that it seemed simultaneous, the asking and the acceptance.

And I ponder prayer . . . and how our prayers are answered (whether to our liking or not is another matter) virtually as the prayer leaves our mouths or hearts . . . as if all God was waiting for was for us to ask.

Wonder what it would be like if we thought of prayer as friending God?

I friended God today . . .
and just as I hit ‘enter’
God accepted me as a friend . . .
Turns out that God had already friended me a long time ago . . .

Turns out God’s been keeping up with my status all along

Turns out God’s been liking what I’ve been up to . . .
most of the time . . .

Turns out God just loves how we all gossip about God on our FB pages
She actually reads every post
every update
checks out every link

I friended God today
Turns out we’re already friends
I don’t know how that works
but I love that it does.

Now Thank We All Our God

It’s Wednesday tea time, when some gals in the church and I gather together to pray and talk and study.  Today we’re looking at hymns, considering favorites, looking at back stories.

Angelika comes with Now Thank We All Our God.  What Angelika shared from the life of Martin Rinkart, who wrote the words to the hymn, is of a godly man living in a time of great suffering: The Thirty Years’ War was ravaging Europe; the plague had resurfaced and as the only surviving  pastor in his community, Martin buried 4,000 people; and a famine further wracked the already decimated population.

It was into that space of suffering and devastation that Martin Rinkart wrote, Now thank we all our God, with heart and hands and voices, who wondrous things hath done, in whom His world rejoices.

How, in the midst of the crucible of suffering, are such words even possible?  We ponder the question together, one speaking of God’s grace emerging in ways discernible after the suffering has ended.  She speaks of the grace of hindsight, of what I think of as Joseph’s benediction upon his murderous brothers at the end of Genesis: what you intended for my evil, God used to the good.  It is the idea not that God visits suffering upon us, but rather that God transforms the suffering into something useful, something beautiful even, and in the transforming of the ‘thing’, God transforms us.

But Rinkart isn’t writing after the suffering is past.  He’s writing in the middle of the suffering, right from the heart of the spiritual and physical blast site.

And in the German, Angelika tells us, it’s even more obvious, this joy and faith-claim to God: [God], who from our childhood, has given us too much. . . 

“Too much”.  The phrase stands out so much more than the English Hath blessed us.  Even when it seems as if we have nothing, God has given us “too much”, so great is the divine blessing of relationship.

Martin Rinkart was speaking hope from suffering to suffering.  It was the benediction not of the fool, but of the experienced.  And from the experience, Rinkart does not celebrate suffering; rather, he sees through the suffering to the reality of God standing there.  And what Rinkart sees is bounty.  And peace.  And divine nearness.  And grace.  And guidance.  And perplexity.

What Rinkart ‘sees’ is God.

Things are as bad as they seem . . .

The economy continues to reel.  Cause and effect and effect and cause are continuously debated while behind the statistics and the arguments, real people search for real work and real meaning.

The earth seems to make war upon itself as disaster upon disaster are heaped one upon the other, with no relief in sight.

Things really are as bad as they seem.

Thus it has ever been; and thus, I suspect, it will ever be.

Things are as bad as they seem.  And I wonder why we are surprised.  We spend so much time preparing for the rainy day, never seeming to grasp that the very nature of the rainy day is its unexpectedness.  We prepare for floods and get droughts . . . stock up on food only to find that it’s water we need . . . set aside money only to have the value of the money turn to ash.

Things are as bad as they seem.  But so what?

It’s not Pollyanna speaking to say that acknowledging reality is not the same as being held captive to it.

We in the United States seem to be spoiling for a fight with we know not who for reasons we know not why.  I’m thinking it’s because we the people somehow believe that we were promised something we cannot recognize by someone we cannot name.  We name that something ‘happiness’ and God protect the one who would get in our way of its pursuit.

We so proudly proclaim that we are a ‘God-fearing nation’, as if that were a good thing.  Maybe, just maybe, we would do better to be God-relying, God-trusting, God-embracing.  For surely what we need is more trust in the source of our true security.  More trust and less fear, even, and perhaps especially, of God.

After all, Fear not! wasn’t a suggestion.

Diminished

A young friend sat with a new friend and heard a story of evil unspeakable.  I do not know the details.  I do not have to.

It is not to our own evil that I speak, but to the evil of others, not us, but still somehow very much us.

Being a minister, a pastor, means that people share themselves with us in ways unique . . . we walk with them through dark and lonesome valleys as much as over joy-filled mountaintops.

Their wounds are shared with us . . . and in a sense, their wounds become ours . . .

The cost of the journey to the pastor, the therapist, the professional listener, even has a name: “compassion fatigue”, as if you could become tired from caring about other people.

The name is not adequate.  It is too understated and too overstated, all at once.

It says too much to say that caring about other people makes you tired.  People are not a set of jumping jacks or a run around the track to be recovered from.  A good nap, that’s what I need . . . or so suggests the notion of fatigue.  But it says too little to say that it’s merely fatigue, this cost to my body and soul of the lent ear.

I think, perhaps, that John Donne hit closer to the mark: we are not fatigued by the pain and wounding of others . . . what we are is diminished . . . somehow made less than we were before . . .

The evil that others do to still yet others diminishes me.  It makes me less than I was.  Less sure.  Less confident.  Less important.  Less human.  Less.

In empathy, I can cry for their loss, their hurt, their woundedness, but I am also crying for my own less-ness.

Let it be said that in the listening, there is holy space.  There is room for the divine silence that is really the divine anguish, expressed beyond something as ordinary as sound.  It is the place of the rent curtain, of Rachel weeping for her children, of the earth splitting itself and the sun disappearing from sight in the sky.  It is the place beyond words where only the Holy Spirit travels, alone, comforting and comfortless.

Yet into such breaches does the pastor walk, often unwittingly, only to be blind-sided by yet another story of horror made ordinarily surreal by the comfortable living room surroundings in which the story is so often told.

Feeling helpless and hopeless, the pastor listens, nods the head, tries to seem caring and wise and come up with something important to say, something, anything, that will somehow magically change the past.  And then she remembers what she has learned time and time again . . . the past cannot be changed. . . it is the listening here and now that matters . . . there is healing in honoring the story and the teller . . . there is honor in the lent ear, reminding the wounded one that her story matters, that she matters.

It is not everything.  And it seldom even feels like enough.  But it will have to do, because it is all there is.  This ground is not the ground of redemption or purpose.  There is no purpose in the gratuitous infliction of pain and harm upon the defenseless.  There is only pain.  The pain matters because the person to whom it happened matters.  They were made less than, they were diminished.  And in hearing their pain, so am I.

If I’m Lying, I’m Dying: Jacob & Esau & the Cost of Violence: A Conversation Between Me and Myself

Can we say that violence (always) begins with deception?    

I bracket the always, ever wary of the universal claim.


Then I backpedal, just a bit. . . 

Maybe we can say that deception is, perhaps, the most-often unrecognized and perpetrated act of violence by we humans.

Maybe?  Perhaps?  Could I qualify it into meaninglessness any more?

Deception tears us apart from within.

Now we're getting somewhere.

And deception is the handmaid of (physical) violence -- the lies we (must) tell ourselves to justify the violence we do, those particular forms of deception, are, by their very nature . . .

     unending . . .

          shocking in their daring . . .

               infinite in their scope . . .

                    abyss-filling in their capacity destroying . . .

Jacob and Esau serve as paradigms . . . but their reality is achingly human . . . achingly broken . . . achingly true . . .

***

The shooting and the dying continue unabated (Gunman Used AK47 in IHOP Shooting) and we tell ourselves that the profits made from the weapons of destruction have no bearing on the destruction . . . no place in the conversation . . . no impact on our ‘rights’ to be bearers of such destruction . . .(Gun Violence in NYC)

We need not be an infinite string of Jacobs and Esaus locked in eternal combat . . . like the brothers, we too can find the pathway to peace . . . beginning with forgiveness, reconciliation, and putting down our arms, our 'right to be right' . . . and embracing each other in the love and Spirit of God.

We can.  

Where Were You?

A 9/11 Reflection

Where were you?  Who should be allowed to participate?  Who should be kept out?  Should it be a celebration of life?  A memorial to the dead?  We were forever changed!  We haven’t changed a bit!  We came together.  We’ve been broken apart.  What do you think?  What’s your story?  Where were you on 9/11?  Where were you?  Where were you?

It is as if we are asking not each other, but God.  Where, dear God, were you?  Why did not Your hand stay the course of destruction?  Why did you not save us human beings from ourselves?  It is the question believing humans tend to ask only when the tragedy happens to us, forgetting John Donne’s poignant rhetorical advice to the ages: . . .  any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee . . .”  — Donne, Meditation XVII

The images of September 11, 2001 are iconic.  The sound bites endless.  And the never-ending flow of statistics both tell and hide the story in all its horrible and glorious humanity: 

• Time it took to build the Twin Towers: almost twenty years

• Time it took the Towers to fall: 12 seconds

• Total number killed in attacks (as of 9/5/02): 2,819

• Number of nations whose citizens were killed in attacks: 115

• Number of people who lost a spouse or partner: 1,609

• Estimated number of children who lost a parent: 3,051

• Tons of debris removed from site: 1,506,124

• Percentage increase in Peace Corps applications from 2001 to 2002: 40

• Percentage increase in CIA applications from 2001 to 2002: 50

• Firefighters & police officers of New York City represented 13% of those who died

• FDNY & NYPD families received 25% of charitable monies raised

SOURCES:   Building of the World Trade Center and Statistics a Year Later

The statistic that strikes me the most is that the Peace Corps saw a 40% increase in applications, while the CIA saw a 50% increase.  People wanted, it seems, to do something.  The response, either to peace or to something more difficult to define, probably depended largely on individual personalities and convictions.  

It’s been 10 years now.  I wonder whether the increased interest in either or both held true over time.  Somehow I doubt it.  We’re a forgetful people.  Sometimes that’s a good thing.  But sometimes it’s a costly luxury, this failing to remember.

And so I sit quietly at home, remembering and thinking on scripture passages that speak of the silence of God . . . not the non-responding silence of the seemingly absent deity, but the silence of the “still, small voice” . . . the silence that begets silence as its own worship-filled response. . . the silence of my own re-write of the Psalm . . . know that I am God and be still . . . it is the enormous silence of facing my God, who in the face of my own questions (to paraphrase William Sloan Coffin), is asking me how I could have let such things happen.

Where were you? 

Where was I?