vitalwholeness

“Happy birthday to whomever, happy birthday to whomever, your rhyme and your meter, demonstrate you’re not clever.” No, that’s not the song!

“Blow out the candles! Make a wish!” Can I have more than one? Ok, here’s my wish list. It supposedly cannot be granted other than on this day, in this candle ritual. And one of the rules is that I am not supposed to sound like a contestant in a pageant (I would like world peace):

That our beloved country moves from a broken, contentious, two-party political system to something else. It may not happen before I blow out my last candle, but it would be nice.

Part two to the preceding wish is that new and real pragmatic leadership would arise that would be centrist, problem-solving, and not beholden to powerful interests, whether they be from the affluent heights or the activist streets.

Every college student would study abroad.

Every high school student would be required, at minimum, to study one foreign language.

Each city council across the land would have an advisory committee made up of representatives of all the world faiths found in that community.

We pay teachers like rock stars and police and firemen are paid a living wage. There would be a pool of social service sector jobs for every able bodied and minded person to work, contribute and support themselves in a reasonable fashion.

Corporate CEOs would not receive compensation that is 400 times that of the average worker.

We strike a balance between encouraging entrepreneurs and reasonably regulating those who would abuse the rest of us.

A new movement grabs hold that is something like “responsible parenting” and men and women take it with equal seriousness. This movement is reflected in the way we provide for early childhood in every social sector.

Homelessness became something that used to be.

Religious Faith came back out of the shadows and into the public marketplace of ideas, but not as some kick-back, extremist, anti-modern voice that embarrasses those who are spiritual and practitioners. Rather, it emerges as a serious reflective voice that adds dimension to real debate about values, priorities and the future of the world.

Renewed dignity is restored to our military by the way civilian leaders deploy them; we not only defend ourselves when threatened, but become very cautious about staging elective wars, especially those motivated by protecting huge financial interests abroad.

It becomes normal to be proud of one’s country and a world citizen at the same time.

Happiness comes to be seen as something quite different than amassing many material possessions. Simplicity is embraced. And every citizen accepts that environmentally responsible and conserving living is necessary for all – individually and corporately.

Love is treasured for its own sake, apart from social convention that defines it narrowly and prescribes certain ways that families should look.

The Bible is rescued from a narrow, literalistic, and constricted interpretation in order to release its native poetry, metaphor, religious imagination and life-changing stories.

Every child experiences the example of at least one powerful religious guide and mentor.

That every person has access to good medical care.

We come to invest in the future, not only in research in every field, but in developing an atmosphere of innovation and experimentation where the future is seen as a possibility yet to be created.

That humans continue to ethically control technology rather than technology control us.

We help people figure out what to do with the deep, silent, spiritual, restful spaces in life, as a salve against the frenetic life.

We love the Lord our God with all our heart, mind, soul and strength, and our neighbor as ourselves.

Last Sunday night, at our worship gathering called the CORE, we sketched the difference between the Peace of Rome and the Peace of Christ, one contrasted in one way or another in the Gospels.

On the Roman side we drew the story of empire imposed; the crushing overlay of imposed peace, that was really a mechanism of external control. Power that takes no prisoners represses any dissent, therefore there is no conflict. Call that the peace of Augustus Caesar, said Roman culture. Never mind the collateral damage.

On the Gospel side we listen and watch as Christians name an alternate reality by borrowing the same words applied to Caesar: Savior, Lord, Peace, Kingdom, Epiphany, Good News…

The purpose can hardly be disguised. “We,” say the Gospel writers, “proclaim a Lord and Kingdom of a different order, that brings a different sort of peace, and it is not Roman, not construed by the principalities and powers of this age and world.” And if that were not enough, “The King of the Jews, power-less as he appears hanging on the instrument of crowd-control, the cross, actually is released into the world in such a way that he can never be killed. The war is over, Rome will fall, but God is the Lord of the universe.”

So the angels sing to peasants who can hear it because they are not seduced by an empire, the Roman empire, that takes from them but does not give. Here is another announcement, bizarre and unreal: Glory to God in the Highest, and on earth, peace, among those with whom he is well pleased.”

A different herald, a different kind of savior, a different kind of peace.

It is for every generation to choose, to make a decision about which path shall be taken, which empire grasped, what Lord before which we shall bow down. Those things never change. And the choice remains for us today. However sweet the Hallmark cards seem, it’s a messy choice: Choose this day whom you will serve, this or that. Put that on a Christmas card and see how it sells.

One theme that reoccurred over and over, both in Noirin Ni Rian’s recent Celtic Soul performance at Broadway Christian Church  and her the Celtic Music/Spirituality Retreat, was that one must listen to the sound of God. Behind every great religious tradition is this sound, this pulsing of the universe, the pulsing of our consciousness. And silence becomes the stage upon which the sound of God makes its guest appearances.

The Irish religious tradition, in particular, is especially in tune with the sounds of nature, the sounds of human voice, and the sounds of a tradition finding its way toward God. She calls this “theosony” (theos=God, sony=sound), or God sound.

What better way to think of Advent? Listening for the appearance. And we light the candles, sing the carols, hear pronouncements of prophets enjoining us to wait for the songs of angels.

Good friend Barbara Kent read my last post and shared the following story with me. I twisted her arm and asked if I could run it here:

I agonize over which bananas to buy or when the bananas I have bought are too ripe to eat.  I always feel guilty if I do not manage to eat the bananas I buy before they turn brown and mushy.  Brown bananas remind me how poor are some of my choices and how out of order are my priorities.

As I read the words of Job (14:1-2) about the brevity of life and the words of Joshua (24:14-15) encouraging the people to choose whom they would serve, I thought about something my late husband Dan regularly quoted from an Erma Bombeck column: “Life is too short to eat brown bananas.”

Job might have used bananas instead of flowers to describe the fleeting quality of life.  Like flowers, bananas do not last long.  Life is a lot like bananas and flowers.

When I read Joshua’s words, I realized that making good choices helps to get priorities in order.  Or, is it the other way around?  Joshua counseled the people to choose whom they would serve.  His choice was made:  he had chosen to serve God!

Long ago Dan made the same choice Joshua made.  He chose to serve God.  That choice helps him to make other choices.  In a sense, making the right choice in who he would serve helped him get the priorities of life in the right order.

Dan kept a stained glass plaque of Joshua’s words in verse 15 hanging in the window by the front door of our house:  “As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.”  Whether the sunlight cascaded through the colors in the glass or the moonlight brushed the colors with shadows, all who entered Dan’s house were reminded of the priorities that guided his life and the life of his household.

Erma Bombeck was right: “Life is too short to eat brown bananas.”  More importantly, life is too short to serve other gods!

Lord, thank you for life, for choices, for priorities, for Dan, and for brown bananas.  Help me, like Joshua and Dan, to make the choices that set the priorities of my life in the right order.

It is the great American unload-the-car-after-Thanksgiving gig. And because I want to minimize the number of trips up the stairs, it is very important to pack as many items on each trip as is possible. Last trip: One medium size suitcase, one small guitar amplifier, one steel empty cooking pot. As I’m half-way up a flight of stairs the cooking pot, which is under the arm carrying the suitcase, starts to slowly slide downward, obeying master gravity. I am at once faced with a familiar set of decisions, a cameo of life.

If something falls, what will it be? If I try to somehow save everything at the same time I very well could lose it all. Like a juggler fumbling after an entire set of balls rather than catching at least one or two, I could lose a suitcase, amplifier and cooking pot. What to do?

First, I have to choose, prioritize. If only one object survives the tumble, which shall be saved? And more importantly, why?

Will I base this decision on what is most valuable? Of all the items, one may be most valuable, but why? Is it because of its cash value? Or is it the most difficult to replace? Of all the candidates, does this one have sentimental value? Do I need this object immediately and couldn’t find a replacement in time? Are the runners up simply a dime-a-dozen? Or will some survive a fall, experience little damage from being dropped?

The amp won the contest for several of the reasons listed above. But that was not a particularly difficult decision. The problem with the rest of life is that such choices are hard to make.

How does one weigh the relative good for two people? How do you choose between the needs of two children, for instance, when immediate attention can only be given to one? If there are two genocides taking place at the same time and the potential rescuer has only enough resource and force to break up one, which is chosen and why?

If we are striving, for instance, to “do no harm” or “do only good,” how do we do that when we encounter competing goods? Do we settle on doing lesser harms? Or, in the case of situational, utilitarian ethics, with love as a guiding principle, how do we know, how do we choose what is the most loving thing in each concrete situation – considering the complexities?

And so consider the parable of unloading the car and hiking up the stairs with arms full. Some things must be saved at all cost. And others, sometimes tragically, must fall. And how, good friend, can we find the grace to know, to choose, to act? And can we live with that choice, the one thing saved, the others fallen?

It’s become axiomatic today to talk about our open source universe of knowledge, that knowledge, as a collection of information or of authors, is no longer propitiatory, the possession of a select few who are schooled in an area of expertise. Wide ranging sources of information and research are available at the click of a mouse. Entire libraries abide online.

What is not available, however, is the experience and wisdom to access, digest and integrate this daunting array of data. Not only does the exponential expansion of knowledge in all fields make it impossible for the unguided to navigate its ways and byways, but radical open-sourcing does not insure anything like accuracy. Anyone can post anything anywhere, no matter its truth or falsehood. Our sources are not only ubiquitous, but they are untrustworthy.

What we need in such a time are wise guides, themselves already initiated into the arenas of their inquiry. Mastery, then, does not only mean mastery of content (though a minimum must be expected); because of the ever-expansive nature of knowledge now, there exists the  impossibility of mastery of rapidly multiplying content. Mastery now involves much more than content, but rather a schooled mind that  is able to understand and interpret complexities placed before it. And that schooled perceptive mind is formed from experience, exposure to the thorny problems of life, and the examples of mentor minds. In spiritual terms we also understand that wisdom, a deep integration of conscious and unconscious knowing, is a gift and a grace, varying widely in scope and intensity from person to person. The wise guide is one who knows how to know what is known.

Leadership, too, is dependent on mastery of many things, one of them being content. But most of all the mastery most required is a spiritual integration, a merging of mind and heart so that what is spoken, what is asked, what is demonstrated itself provides a way. This is some of what Parker Palmer describes. And dynamic leadership goes a good deal beyond those categories, too.

I recently was talking to an entrepreneur who is, by any standards, wildly successful. Her “product” and her “public relations” are stellar. And yet she longs for a leadership that is more transformative. Her journey has taken her from technician to some quest for leading by heart, trusting her instincts, listening to some wisdom that is beyond the many voices. From there, that place, comes a centered sense of direction, one that is easily shared with others.

When it comes down to it, in whatever endeavor, it is the person who is doing the living, doing the leading, who makes the real difference. And in the end the honoring of the powers of spirit within each provides the energy, access and direction to go where one must go, against all odds, swimming both up and downstream.