All’s Clear

Posted: January 18, 2014 in Uncategorized
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(The following meditation was offering at the Jazz Worship of Broadway Christian Church at Rocheport, Missouri on Saturday evening, January 18, 2014)

All’s Clear  Timothy L. Carson   Matthew 2:19-23  Jan 18, 2014

One of the things we gloss over in the Christmas story and its aftermath is peril. King Herod talks to visiting Magi about the birth of a rival king and then goes about liquidating the young males in Bethlehem to take care of the problem. The Magi return by a different route home to avoid him. The Holy Family flees to Egypt to avoid him. Joseph waits to come back home until after Herod dies to avoid him. The whole story is filled with peril and avoidance and dodging and weaving. Getting Jesus born is risky business. And as we discover getting out alive will be impossible.

I have been thinking a lot about all that dodging and weaving, the survival instinct laced with dreamy angel-filled intuitions. I can only conclude that we have sentimentalized and sterilized the Biblical story until it becomes a weak reflection of itself.

What we’ve omitted is one of the most important things, namely, the simple truth that If God is going to be doing anything it’s always in the context of a mess. And that’s because that’s how life really is and God comes to life in all its actuality, the way it is.

God comes in the middle of conflict, before the issues are settled, while chaos rules, when threats are real and people suffer and die. That’s where God is to be found, in the indescribable joy and perplexity of it all.

Let me give you an example. When Joseph perceives an “all clear” in an angel-filled dream he heads back to Israel from Egypt, but he can’t just return as though nothing has happened in the meantime. Herod may be dead but his successor is just as nasty. No, when he goes back he still has to find a new home to settle, ply his trade and raise his family. Nazareth gets the nod.

So even when a clearing is made it is not like you can return to business as usual; that’s not the case.

God might make a way for us in the wilderness but it’s not a way back to what was before. In fact there is nothing left of what was before, not as it really was.

Think about your life. Something happens and you have to go to Egypt. When the worst is over you can return to normal but normal isn’t really what it used to be. Some things have changed forever and other things take their place. And most importantly we have changed and when we return nothing can ever be the same. The truism “You can never go home” is literally true because home is unalterably changed because we have changed.

In Joseph’s case a new threat simply took the place of the old one. No, if he got a break it was just half of one, a half of a break; his homecoming required improvisation which is about all any of us can do on the way through life.

So here is the word of encouragement if you can call it that: In the same way that the world Jesus was born into was messy, so ours is, too.

In the same way that God wrote between the lines to fulfill sacred purposes, so God does now. Against all the odds Jesus got born into that kind of world and Jesus still gets born into this one. That is, there is still room for Jesus to make his way through the brambles to find a place in my life and yours, in this tangled world that is not always hospitable to the One who made it.

If you have ever read A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving you will remember the story of the strangest birth of the strangest person who brought the strangest truth to the strangest circumstances. Irving begins his story this way:

“I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice. Not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother’s death, but because he is the reason I believe in God. I am a Christian because of Owen Meany.”

The truth-telling Owen, with his creaky voice, waits for his destiny to appear, the moments for which he must have been born, and then, when no one else would do or could do he was there and ready.

And being there and being ready is the least and best we can do. If we are go move through this complex and beautiful and terrible world we can do so gracefully if we wait, if we ready ourselves for the next great opportunities of God, if stay nimble on our feet and dare to start over again and again. Joseph must find a new home, Nazareth, when he returns, and we must find a new home time and again for there’s no going home or at least to the one we remember.

For me it is a comforting thought that Joseph and Mary carried the young Jesus with them on this weave through peril to their next stop. We all know the peril never ends, especially for Jesus, but there is something consoling about that image of carrying the One who will later, in one way or another, carry us.

We don’t have to be the Magi or the Holy Family or Owen Meany in order to make the perilous journeys of faith. But we do need to borrow their courage, their persistence, and trust that to follow without knowing the end of the story is the story. That’s how God makes way through the peril of the world, not easily or directly, but around and through and in the mess that is not about to get any less messy.

And the end of the story is that they came to Nazareth and put down roots, at least as deeply as roots can be planted, until one day, after many years, a young man walked out of Nazareth and left his family behind. He was walking toward his destiny, too, one that continued the twists and turns his family had always known, avoiding the worst until at last the worst could no longer be avoided.

There finally came a time, like there comes times for you and me, when what must be faced can no longer be avoided, and when that time comes we pray for the grace to walk tall and prayerfully in the presence of one carrying us all along.

Shaping Values in the Public Marketplace

Posted: January 16, 2014 in Uncategorized
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I just attended a Diversity Breakfast marking the life, work and values of Martin Luther King, Jr. It is a well-attended event in the Columbia, Missouri community.

As I took in the entire event I asked myself how it is that communities make statements about what is important to them. The answer to that question derives from a repeating pattern. I saw it again this morning.

People agree to gather in one place. They generally identify who they are or what sub-group of the greater whole they represent. This is done with name tags or group table markers. The community eats together, physical and symbolic nurturing of the aggregate.

Symbols and symbolic actions ritualize shared beliefs and loyalty: presentation of the colors, singing the national anthem, saying a prayer that recognizes the transcendent value of it all.

Awards are presented that reinforce the values the group agrees are worth emulating.

Artistic and cultural beauty is shared, a way to join the gathering together around a non-rational common experience.

Someone is engaged to present a speech, oratory which restates the values the community shares and hopefully inspires them to strengthen resolve to pursue them with more effort and commitment.

The event is repeating, which reinforces its importance; not only once, but regularly.

Wait a minute! Am I describing a community event or public worship? Or, because humans are involved and gather the tribe in similar ways, it’s both?

The War on Poverty – LBJ at 50

Posted: January 9, 2014 in Uncategorized
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This is the season of rhetoric. It always is when anniversaries roll around, the markers of significant events, programs or initiatives. This year marks 50 years of LBJ’s announcement of the War of Poverty. Since his time efforts have not always been constant. Different administrations or legislatures either enhanced or diminished the effort.

Depending on your political persuasion you will describe the effort as either an abject failure or wild success. The truth is probably between those poles. And the truth would contain information about actual outcomes and strategies.

During that time, LBJ expanded what could be thought to have birthed during FDR’s efforts 1933-35. Major welfare reform took place during the tenure of Bill Clinton in 1996. Whatever else one might think about AFDC and other programs of support that have been highly debated over the years, several programs were birthed and remain an important part of our social safety net.

Early childhood programs like Head Start contributed a solution to reaching children during the critical early years – including food security for the youngest. The benefits of early childhood education are astounding in terms of investment in our children and their futures.

The combination of Social Security and Medicare can arguably be said to have eliminated poverty among senior citizens. For the most impoverished and disabled Medicaid, SSI and Food Stamps have meant the difference between living in a simple and safe way and being on the streets homeless, sick and dead. Even with these millions have been without health insurance and have experienced a lower life expectancy and reduced level of health for decades. All of these programs actually introduce spending into the economy for all these services in the public sector.

I now believe that provision for these basics contributes to the well-being of those most vulnerable and provides stability for our society as a whole. I am glad they have not been privatized. Can you imagine all those pensions being dependent on the market during the crash of 2007-2012? Can you imagine our seniors’ pensions shrinking? No, some things should not be privatized. And the market is not magical. In fact, the market is manipulated to the advantage of those with power because those same people control and buy influence to make it so.

Every era demands a different response for its own time and our time will be the same. Some things remain vital for social investment and contribute to vitality and stability in the public sector like education, health care and food security. In a time when the gap between the top 1% and the rest is growing exponentially it is immoral to cut taxes and create loopholes for the very wealthiest individuals and corporations (including ALL forms of income, including interest, capital gains and inheritance of estates) and cut the relatively minimal support for those at the bottom. We are willing to cut unemployment insurance in a job market where jobs are scarce but not address corporate welfare, the way ordinary citizens subsidize those with privilege and power. It’s sinful and shameful.

This is hardly big government compared to other Western democracies. It’s rather the rich and powerful controlling government and its elected officials to their scandalous benefit. That’s why during the past decade we have experienced maximum government bailouts for the wealthiest corporations but not a parallel effort to rescue millions of ordinary citizens from home foreclosures – even when those mortgages existed because of predatory and unethical lending practices in the first place.

No matter what mythologies are spun to the public, all this wealth that is vacuumed to the top doesn’t trickle down. It never has. It is hoarded while the middle class is gutted and lower class diminished even more. Without reserves all it takes is losing a job and then experiencing a major hospitalization to spin people into homelessness in short order. No job and no health insurance: the formula for disaster.

So, the war on poverty? It was worth waging. Was it entirely successful? No it wasn’t. Did it and does it need revision? Yes it does. Am I glad that fifty years ago (and thirty years before that) people cared enough about neighbor and the common good to actually try and make a difference? Yes I am. How will future generations look back and describe what we are willing to offer now? You’ll have to answer that one.

Epiphanies during Epiphany

Posted: January 7, 2014 in Uncategorized
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Sure, the season of Epiphany always begins January 6. At Broadway we’ve decided to shape the season with a series of our own epiphanies. We have asked our members to write their first person accounts of their encounters, God moments, revelations, flashes of insight, great confirmations – and collected them under one cover. Laced with the scriptures for our eight Sunday series the booklet becomes a devotional guide, too. We have them in hard copy for those who prowl the halls of Broadway. But anyone can download a copy for their own meditations here.

Sisters in Song: Women Hymn Writers

Posted: January 7, 2014 in Uncategorized
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Sisters in SongIf you haven’t yet availed yourself of Leslie Clay’s new book, Sisters in Song, there is time – especially if you love the hymns of the church and even more the stories of those who wrote them. Sisters in Song is a great book for history and inspiration. You can order it here.

As a special treat go visit her web page/blog. Subscribe to her blog and have those hymn stories drop into your lap, one delectable song at a time: Sisters in Song.

Thanks Leslie!

Morals, decisions, and the market that is not neutral

Posted: January 2, 2014 in Uncategorized
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A friend told me that I could not not read Joseph Stiglitz’s book, The Price of Inequality (Norton, 2013), so I took him at his word. He was right; the Nobel Prize winner in economics has written something true and dangerous. In fact, I’m surprised he is still alive. People who risk telling the truth in the ways he has often end up dying for their honesty and courage.

In short, Stiglitz documents the fast-growing gap between a very small but enormously wealthy and powerful contingent of Americans and the rest of the population. It is a gap unknown in other western style democracies around the world, one only exceeded by totalitarian dictatorships and oligarchies. It is a gap that is the largest the United States has ever known and is growing larger. It is a gap engendered, protected by the resources of those at the tippy-top. And it is a gap that creates huge social instability that threatens all, including the privileged point at the top of the pyramid.

The great financial crisis of 2007 and the recession that has followed showcased this disparity and the unfairness that fills our entire financial and social system: Mega-bonuses for failing CEOs; bailouts of those who risked the country’s prosperity for the sake of greed with the tax dollars of those most hurt; deceptive tax code and legislation secured by armies of lobbyists, attorneys and campaign contributions; the dismantling of the social safety net while lowering taxes and creating tax loopholes for the very richest; laying off workers as the corporation makes enormous profit and pays outsized salaries and bonuses to those at the top. This list goes on. And they are legitimized, these practices, by creating mythologies that the more we insure that the very richest are protected the 99% will, too. But it doesn’t work that way. It never has.

For in depth exploration of the way that the top vacuums all the resources from the bottom, how deregulation allows exploiting by a market that is far from neutral, how our political process is controlled by the most powerful who always devise laws and decisions around their own interests, including instrumentalities like the Federal Reserve, read on. It’s chilling, but deserves our attention.

We have been in peril. It is not getting better and not because of “big government.” Our future as a people is at stake because of an enormous and growing inequality gap, one that is safe-guarded by the most monied and powerful. We now have less of a one person-one vote society and more of a one dollar-one vote society.

I am not promising you a pleasant read with this book. In fact, it tilts to the troubling side. But I can promise an enlightening read. My friend was right, darn him.

The Woodcutter

Posted: December 31, 2013 in Uncategorized
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“Earth’s crammed with heaven and every common bush afire with God.”
Elizabeth Barrett Browning

The thing about epiphanies, God moments, break-ins of the sacred, is that they are everywhere because, as Browning said, Earth’s crammed with them. That means, of course, that these epiphanies are not as unusual as our ability or readiness to see them. Prayer is more like seeing differently than anything else so a prayerful life is walking through your days attentive to what is happening all the time.

My days have been filled with non-stop epiphanies, some more dramatic than others. They range from as simple as seeing a left over crumb of communion bread in a hymnal, to the moment of one’s last breath, to a unitary apprehension that I am somehow one with that which made me. They are everywhere. But I will share one.

Years ago I was in Nepal and visiting one of the hospices of Mother Teresa. It was a grace-filled place, meant to gather up the dying with gentle care and loving embrace at the end. Characterized by the upmost simplicity, people gathered in the interior courtyard and the surrounding hallways on simple mats. The sisters circulated and offered simple gestures of food, washing and prayer. It was enough.

The hospice was located near one of the sacred rivers. Adjoining the hospice was a Shiva temple with all of its fertility symbols, and by that a cremation pad where the ashes of the dead would eventually tumble into the river and float out to the abyss. Near all this was situated the encampment of a Brahmin holy man who we will call the wood cutter because, well, that’s what he did.

As people passed by, going about their business, this man would, on some time table known only to him, come out of his hut and approach a large log. He was skin and bones and gray-haired. He reached down, retrieved an ax, and held it in his two hands as he regarded the log in front of him. After gazing at it for some time he lifted the axe and delivered one exact cut, no more. And with that his work was done, for the time being, until he returned later to deliver one more cut.

As he turned from the log to return to his hut his eye caught my own, standing as I was in curiosity, entranced with this strange moment. And he smiled a big toothy smile like he had just won the lottery, or passed out cigars at the birth of a first child or received his first kiss. I will never forget that expression, the eyes, the utter contentment and his apparent sense that all was well with the world and with him, that he was doing exactly what he should be doing right then and there, chopping the log one blow at a time.

Because he didn’t tell me what it meant to him and rather returned to his meditation in the tent, he left me to surmise for myself the purpose of his wood cutting ways. I can only share my own impression of what it might have meant, and the strings I pulled together go something like this:

We are compelled to do many things but chopping a piece of wood is just as good as any, depending on what you are contemplating as you do it. Life is doled out one chop at a time, too, and soon enough the chopping will be over and the logs will remain. You can only chop one at a time because that is all there is, really, and doing it with your full heart and mind is what matters. And until you get to the point that chopping a block of wood is fulfilling as, say, building a skyscraper, you haven’t arrived because you’re attached to all the wrong things.

Most of all, though, was the expression of joy in the wood cutter’s face. I suspect that he could have been gathering mushrooms or playing with tinker toys and it wouldn’t have mattered, he would have experienced the same interior thing. If there was ever an epiphany about overcoming the compulsions of life, my compulsions, that would be it. And whenever I think that I must do one more thing to somehow justify my existence I think of his grizzled face, smiling, as the axe found its target one more time.

2013 in review

Posted: December 31, 2013 in Uncategorized
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The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2013 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

A New York City subway train holds 1,200 people. This blog was viewed about 6,300 times in 2013. If it were a NYC subway train, it would take about 5 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

Philomena: Magdalene Sisters II

Posted: December 29, 2013 in Uncategorized
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Judy Dench just gets better and better. Her portrayal of an older woman in search of the child who was removed from her early in life is stunning. The setting is that of a home for unwed mothers and their children run by the Magdalene Sisters. That name alone should shake the halls of memory. This particular order became notorious for the treatment of young wards under their care, exploiting them and profiting from their socially and religiously shameful situation.

The movie, The Magdalene Sisters, is required viewing, a Part I, to prepare for Philomena. It presents the story of the now exposed abuse of the Irish religious order. In terms of popular music, Joni Mitchell’s The Magdalene Laundries tells the story in song.

So now you have as much as three things to do, two movies and a song. The good news is that the scandal was eventually matched by a revelation of the truth and closure of the homes. That was much too late for many of the victims, but justice slowly turned. Philomena is the latest installment of the story and well worth the effort – both in making the film and receiving it.

Saving Mr. Banks

Posted: December 28, 2013 in Uncategorized
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I have to admit that I wasn’t especially motivated to see this movie. Well sure, Tom Hanks is playing the part of Walt Disney and Emma Thompson the author of Mary Poppins, P.L. Travers. That had to count for something. It did.

I was not prepared for the surprise I received, that this film would go so deep and leave me in tears. It is masterful. And I’m watching Mary Poppins again as soon as possible.

Never underestimate the way our personal stories interact with the imagination and the way they link with others in ways we never anticipate.

Five stars here. Here’s to every Mr. Banks and those who had one. Makes me want to fly a kite.

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